Police Substations Spread Across Spokane Residents Fed Up With Crime Are Turning Community Policing From An Idea To A Movement

On Spokane’s North Hill, residents - tired of car break-ins, graffiti and strange cars cruising down residential streets - are joining the community-oriented policing movement.

In Otis Orchards, workers at a grocery store, the library and post office cite problems similar to those on the North Hill. They’ve started community policing, too.

Such programs typically feature residents working with law enforcement to begin police substations. At the stations, trained volunteers take crime reports and serve as neighborhood links to police officers.

Throughout the Spokane area, community policing is no longer an experiment, but a program that’s here to stay. Supporters say substations deter criminals.

“People given their right to participate will do so,” said Cheryl Steele, who helped organize the first substation in the West Central neighborhood.

West Central residents started the substation after two girls in the neighborhood had been abducted in October 1991.

Since then, six others have been started in the city. This year, another half-dozen substations are planned, including one at the Spokane Transit Authority’s new transit center downtown.

Uniformed reserves and senior volunteers from the Police Department will work at the substation.

Five Spokane police neighborhood resource officers are working with residents throughout the city. Three more are expected to be hired this year.

In the county, community policing also has been embraced during the last year. Three substations have opened.

Even residents in Suncrest, about 20 miles away in southern Stevens County, asked Steele for help in starting a substation.

“Suncrest is unique in that it’s considered a suburb of Spokane. It just happens to be on the other side of the county line,” said Ted Campbell, a Stevens County sheriff’s detective and Suncrest resident. “With that comes some of the crime of the city.”

About 120 Suncrest residents came to the first meeting earlier this month about launching a substation, he said.

But communities don’t necessarily need a substation to begin neighborhood policing programs.

“Cop shops aren’t the only answer,” Steele said.

Spokane’s North Hill neighborhood has no police substation.

“Quite frankly, right now it doesn’t matter if we do,” said Mary Kay Pupo, 36, who has lived in the neighborhood all her life.

About 35 of the neighborhood’s residents are patrolling North Hill streets on weekend nights.

“If you let minor crime go, it turns into major crime,” Pupo said.