Dec. 31, 2000

OPEN HOUSE AT THE NEIGHBORHOOD LOCKUP

I moved over the summer, and during the holidays one of my new neighbors had an open house.

The helicopter was nifty. But talking to the SWAT team was fascinating too.

Yes, my neighbor one block over is the downtown headquarters of the Denver Police Department at 13th Avenue between Cherokee and Delaware streets. The jail is there too, or as it is more familiarly known, the Pre-Arraignment Detention Facility.

Rounding out this urban scene is the block of quaint Victorian houses along Delaware Street, referred to as Bail Bond Row.

Police headquarters is in the area of Denver called the ''Golden Triangle'' by residents and merchants, but officially the Civic Center neighborhood, bounded by Speer Boulevard, Colfax Avenue and Lincoln Street. It has new residential buildings like mine, renovated lofts, antique stores, art galleries and restaurants, as well as public buildings like the Art Museum, the main Denver library, the U.S. Mint and the Civic Center itself.

If there were not already a jail in a neighborhood like this, I think it's safe to say, NIMBY sentiment would guarantee one would never be built. People would be screaming about declines in their property values or danger to their kids.

But there is already a jail. The police administration building was completed in 1976. And if property values are lower because of the police department's presence, I can only be grateful because I couldn't have afforded any more property values than I bought. But I don't believe they are.

Nobody else seems to be worried either. Neighborhood residents cheerfully trooped over on a brisk Saturday afternoon to meet the department's horses and dogs, tour the crime labs, gawk at the drug museum and have coffee and cookies.

At the open house, the department handed out crime summaries for the neighborhood along with detailed block-by-block crime maps, which are both intriguing and reassuring.

Over 11 months in 2000, there were 560 offenses recorded in the area. Forty were ''crimes against the person,'' including one homicide and two sexual assaults, the rest robberies and aggravated assaults.

The homicide was a ''road rage'' incident in May, when a bicyclist who got into an argument with the driver of a pickup truck was shot and killed. Frightening in general, but not reason to worry about this neighborhood specifically being unsafe.

The two biggest categories among the property crimes were larceny and drug offenses, accounting for more than 40 percent between them. Neither is especially threatening.

What was even more striking on the map is how localized offenses are. Each area on the grid is 300 feet by 500 feet, roughly a single intersection and half a block in each direction.

First, there seems to be a crime ''hot spot'' right at police HQ. Now, I haven't a very high opinion of the intelligence of those who choose crime as a profession, but even so I would expect them to prefer some other locale. The correct explanation, however, is that when a crime occurs whose location is unknown -- a wallet missing at the end of a day spent running errands, say -- it is recorded where it is reported.

One in seven of all the offenses recorded in the neighborhood occurred on the Broadway side of Civic Center Park. And there's a somewhat seedy stretch on the west side of Broadway south of the park. I didn't need a map to tell me that.

But a block away, the offense rate drops to almost nothing. Since I walk a lot, I'm very glad to know that.

Though I don't recall anyone on the tour using the phrase, this kind of pre-crisis outreach is at the heart of community policing. Last week I attended a neighborhood committee meeting, and a couple of officers stopped by for a few minutes at the beginning, just to introduce themselves and make sure we all had their phone numbers if needed.

''This is one of the safest parts of the city,'' one said when I told him about the map. Getting us new residents involved will help to keep it that way.

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