CAPE ISSUES AREN'T UNIQUE, PANEL SAYS; TIME MAGAZINE HOLDS MEETING IN CITY TO GATHER INFORMATION

Cape Girardeau faces the same problems, prejudices and challenges as the rest of America when it comes to creating a safe community, and communication is the key to rebuilding trust between police and residents, a panel concluded.

As the nation grapples with issues of personal safety, racial profiling and prejudices, Time magazine is trying to get an understanding of how those issues affect the average person. The magazine stopped in Cape Girardeau Wednesday night as part of its "Pulse of America" tour down the Mississippi River.

About 75 people attended a community forum at the Show Me Center hosted by the magazine. Certain city and university officials as well as civic leaders had been invited to take part in the by-invitation-only meeting.

A list of names was submitted to the magazine by the city staff, Southeast Missouri State University and Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce. From those names a panel was chosen to talk about community policing and public-safety issues.

Panelists included Rick Hetzel, chief of police; Arrick Jackson, a professor in the criminal justice department at Southeast Missouri State; Judith Ann Lang, a downtown business owner; Albert M. Spradling III, mayor of Cape Girardeau; Mark Ruark, assistant principal at Central High School; Lisa Lane, Weed and Seed coordinator for Southeast Missouri; and Charlie Herbst, a reserve police officer with the city.

While the nearly two-hour conversation centered around policing efforts in South Cape Girardeau and how effective those efforts are, it was not meant to exploit any problems within the community, said Ron Stodghill, Midwest bureau chief for Time.

A melee on Good Hope Street in June had brought the city to his attention, he said. Cape Girardeau was chosen as one of two sites for a public forum because it was small enough to represent the smaller communities and large enough to have some of the diversity issues facing larger cities, Stodghill said.

About a dozen people in a crowd of 150 threw gravel and bricks at police officers in the Good Hope area during the incident. Police had been attempting to make an arrest when a fight broke out. Eight officers were injured.

The melee "was something the community had already been talking about," Stodghill said.

During those conversations, city leaders have learned much about how to work with residents and how to better address their problems. Some of the conversations weren't pleasant but helped police understand what residents in the neighborhood expected or understood about police work, said the police chief.

"There are lessons learned from the incident," said the mayor. "We've worked with neighborhood watches to have a positive outcome instead of a negative one."

All of the events since have helped enforce the idea that neighborhoods should be in charge of neighborhoods, Spradling said. "Whether it's in the south, north or west, neighborhoods should take care of themselves."

Building trust between the police who work in the neighborhoods and the people who live there is key to making community policing efforts work, police patrolman Ike Hammonds said. Hammonds and Herbst were instrumental in creating the community policing program in Cape Girardeau.

Forums like the one hosted by Time help make the community police officers' jobs easier, Hammonds said. "It goes a long way to address the issues" because everything has been "laid on the table," he said.

Herbst said that when the police department began its community policing in 1994, police thought they knew what the problems were. After conversations with residents in Indian Park, they realized they were wrong, Hammonds said. They were worried about water pressure and why the locks on the bathroom at the park didn't work like the rest of the locks at city parks and why the grass wasn't mowed as quickly or why trash wasn't picked up, he said.

"Sure they knew about the open-air drug market, but it was the little things that go a long way," Hammonds said.

Once people get comfortable addressing smaller concerns and talking to police, it makes it easier to talk about larger problems, said Cpl. Rick Schmidt, who works with Hammonds at the south precinct office in the Good Hope neighborhood.

No one expected to solve all the problems in just a few hours, nor did the panel address all the issues that came up during the discussion, Stodghill told those who attended. But the forum could be a starting point for what Time will write in its July 4 edition. CNN also shot footage for a special show to air July 2.

The river tour proceeds to New Madrid today before winding up at New Orleans.