COLUMN ONE : Keeping an Eye on the Neighbors : In crime-infested areas, joining Neighborhood Watch groups can be a risky business. What’s worse--fear of crime, or fear of the criminal’s reprisal?

To plenty of people in Walnut Park, the April firebombing of Calvin Bailey’s house came as no surprise. A cheery roofer with the muscled arms of his trade, a husband and father of four, he nonetheless made perfect sense as a target. He had, after all, gone and started a Neighborhood Watch.

While no one was injured, the charred remains of the Baileys’ quarters appalled the city at large, drawing attention from the mayor, television newscasts and the daily paper. All he did was abide by the law and ask others to do the same.

But in the city’s struggling northwest section where the late-night blast occurred, most reaction was more muted. Tongues clucked; heads nodded knowingly. In this part of town, tales like Calvin Bailey’s are as common as plywood-sealed windows, as familiar as hollowed-out cigars refilled with marijuana for sale on the street.

Over on Wren Avenue, Maria Paschal could have told the Baileys what being a block captain can mean. Her earnest newsletters and attempts to hold meetings, she is sure, are the reasons someone shot her car full of holes a year ago. She now commutes by bus.

To the west, on Harney, Pamela Boyd started organizing her neighbors against crime. Then three police officers stormed into her living room and aimed their revolvers at her head. They were responding to an anonymous tip that she was harboring a wanted felon, a man whose name she had never heard before.

“Pam, can’t you see?” said her husband, after the police apologized and left. “Pam, you are definitely stepping on somebody’s toes.”

For more than 20 years, law enforcement agencies nationwide have touted Neighborhood Watch as the key to conquering fear and crime. Take control, police urge citizens. This is the covenant they offer: We will show you how to make your homes secure. You be our eyes and ears, block by block by block. On the familiar orange-bordered Watch signs, the slogan under a cartoon of a lurking, masked man says it all: “We report suspicious activity.”

“Obviously, it’s the right thing to do,” said Betsy Cantrell, crime prevention director of the National Sheriffs Assn., which has popularized Watch groups. “We can’t expect law enforcement to protect us all.”

But on the streets that need reclaiming most, poverty-etched terrain infested with dealers, muggers, prostitutes and pimps, Neighborhood Watch can seem a puny, even dangerous, tool. Understandably, scores of decent people are unwilling to join in.

On Robin Avenue, for instance, a four-block road in Walnut Park where five people were murdered in 1993, Addie Gill sponsored two Watch meetings, but nobody came. In retrospect, she’s glad: “I just retired and I want to live a little.”

This is a sad development, especially considering the Watch’s history: conceived in the wake of the Watts riots as a way to build community strength.

Neighborhood Watch can actually increase fear while having little effect on crime, according to a study of four Chicago communities. And former Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis, who created the Watch in 1969, said it has often been misapplied.

How to do it right, particularly in the most crime-afflicted sectors, is increasingly a matter of debate. Prescriptions include getting professionally trained, intensive guidance, and using Watch groups to attack root causes of crime, such as idleness or lack of jobs. Others advocate a shift in emphasis, from standing up publicly against crime to more furtive maneuvers: In Waterloo, Iowa, cards can be filled in and returned unsigned to block watch captains, and in one Chicago housing project, a telephone hot line has been installed for anonymous tips.

The hardy souls of Walnut Park, the core who won’t give up, are trying all the new moves they can think of. Lately, they’ve had help. The city has experimented with community policing in the neighborhood. An idealistic new alderman has urged residents to join Watch groups. And the St. Louis chapter of the Urban League has attempted to revitalize its own block units which, in Walnut Park, tend to be combined with Neighborhood Watch groups.

Still, only 20 of the 200 blocks in Walnut Park boast active groups, and crime rates are rising.

Everyone knows that of 13,000 residents in Walnut Park, there are many more good people than bad. But trust is in very short supply.

Who wants to open up a house for a block Watch meeting when addicts could attend and case the place for a burglary? Who wants to show up when a dealer’s grandmother or girlfriend could report back on who was there and what they told?

For that matter, what police officer wants to take the risk of revealing law enforcement plans when someone there might warn the targets?

Such worries have proved quite legitimate here.

*

Four years ago, a round-faced man with a gap in his smile approached the driver of a St. Louis Police Department squad car. He said, in essence: “Help.” The supplicant was Calvin Bailey, then aged 32.

The houses on the 5200 block of Emerson Street, where Bailey lived, were being taken over by cocaine merchants.

The officer, Reginald Williams, couldn’t offer much solace. He would pass the information along to detectives, but he suspected it would get lost in the shuffle. The complaint was hardly big-time stuff.

Indeed, the situation was typical for the east side of Walnut Park, a onetime retirement community which followed a classic urban spiral downward during the 1970s: the purchase of homes by middle-class blacks; white flight; two-bedroom houses suddenly available for rent; six and seven tenants at a time moving in.

Then came decay--porches falling down, weeds springing up. Then drugs. With three ramps to Interstate 70, Walnut Park became a convenient stop-off point for customers and wholesale suppliers alike. Groups of small-time dealers within a block or two banded together, calling themselves gangs. A routine drug case to police now involves a cache worth $5,000 to $10,000.

The west side, with its brick Tudors and Georgians, stayed more stable, but trouble spots showed up as the community veterans grew older. One new resident asked a longtime homeowner if he could borrow some baking soda because company was coming and he wanted “to make some biscuits.” What he actually wanted to prepare was crack. Soon cars were coming and going at all hours.

Emerson Street is east. There, the crickets’ rusty-hinges drone had long since been drowned out by louder rhythms: “Gunfire pop pop pop,” in Bailey’s words, “and music boom boom boom.” Desperate women with cravings hailed drivers at the stop sign: “I need some; I’ll do anything you want.” Buyers who couldn’t wait till they got home would smoke their coke on the nearest porch, no matter whose it was.

Two years ago, pregnant with her fourth child, Denise Bailey hit on what she thought was a solution: Neighborhood Watch. If the police couldn’t, or wouldn’t help, they would do the job themselves. She wanted so much to be able to let the children play outside.

The turnout at the inaugural gathering was three. But in time their ranks swelled to a membership of eight. Then the intimidation began.

“You bought a watch from me,” one man told Calvin Bailey. “You bought stolen property.” His meaning was unmistakable.

Knots of young men started gathering on the sidewalk on Neighborhood Watch nights in front of whichever home was the meeting site. Their presence was not meant to reassure.

One neighbor in the Watch moved away; she wanted her son out of the area because he too had started selling drugs. Another announced she also would be leaving; her husband had died. It was easy, and seemed prudent, to let the whole effort slide.

Police involvement with the Watch groups was intermittent at best. Pamela Boyd, president of the Urban League’s block-group effort in Walnut Park, complained that William (Butch) Henderson, the community relations officer, was “hard to get hold of.” Henderson in turn complained that he didn’t even know who the block captains were. He said the Urban League would not release the names. “They say it’s confidential,” he explained.

But other forces were at work. The city began an experiment with community policing. Freed from the endless stream of emergency calls, Officer Reggie Williams and his partner, Robert Farrow, were charged with getting to know the residents and figuring out how to clean up Walnut Park.

They baby-sat. They painted over graffiti. And they decided that one or the other of them should always accompany Henderson on his Neighborhood Watch meeting rounds.

The political landscape was changing, too, with the election last fall of Gregory J. Carter as alderman for the 27th Ward. Beating back crime was high on his agenda. He plugged Neighborhood Watch in his first newsletter to voters. “I’m asking you to either start or reactivate your block units,” he wrote on the front page.

Exasperation set in fast. Williams, hoping to encourage one nervous gathering, confided that a nearby drug house was going to be raided. The day the police zeroed in, their quarry greeted them at the door, laughing. “We moved everything last night,” he said.

Williams and Carter concluded that someone at the Watch meeting must have leaked word. Williams went so far as to accuse Pam Boyd. For a time, she was incensed. But they both knew they needed each other.

To show the good folks they would find other ways to help, Williams and Farrow began bringing city building inspectors along on their narcotics busts. Even if the suspects bailed out or charges weren’t filed, enough serious code violations could almost always be found to evict everyone from the house.

One of the inspectors lived nearby. He drove his city car home one night, and the empty vehicle was set ablaze. Now only inspectors from outside the area come out for the raids.

The dangers of direct action were already apparent to most neighbors, thanks to citizen marches on drug houses organized by Khatib A. F. Waheed, director of Caring Communities Programs. Waheed, with his close-trimmed beard, suspenders and tie, cut a familiar figure throughout Walnut Park because of his work to strengthen families, from school tutoring to substance abuse counseling.

“You sell drugs! You must go!” Waheed’s protesters, anywhere from five to a dozen, chant before each target home on alternate Friday nights.

The voices, however, belong to outsiders, usually clergy or college students. This is because of a shoot ‘em-up in early 1991 that sent ammunition slamming into three houses, all with school-age children in residence, on the same block of Beacon Street. Someone from each place had marched with Waheed. After the bullets flew, the locals stopped participating.

*

It was becoming clear that Neighborhood Watch alone offered no simple fix. Some thought that should have been obvious from the start. “Neighborhood Watch don’t work,” said Chris Carter, brother of Alderman Carter, between phone calls in the alderman’s storefront district office. “There’s no one in charge and no money involved.”

Still, scholars say they understand why so many turned first to the Watch. They blame hype. “I think Neighborhood Watch was basically oversold in the ‘80s,” said Dennis P. Rosenbaum, director of the Center for Research in Law and Justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Practically every police and sheriff’s department in the nation now has an officer who is supposed to help citizens form Watch groups. Forty of 70 programs financed through the Clinton Administration’s Summer of Safety program included the organizing of Neighborhood Watch. Spinoff attempts are legion: Fleet Watch, Postal Watch, Harbor Watch.

At any given time, about a third of America is involved in Watch activities, said Cantrell of the sheriff’s association. Most of that territory, she added, is middle class. “Where you have a homogeneous community, where people have money invested,” she said, “it’s easier.”

Yet even those chapters quite often fall apart, usually because participants get bored. The average life span, Cantrell said, is about two years. Indeed, a New Jersey policeman once estimated that 25% of the Watch signs in his town were mere shipwrecks, marking the spots where a block group went down.

That makes perfect sense to Matt A. Peskin, director of the National Assn. of Town Watch, based in Wynnewood, Pa., an affluent Philadelphia suburb. Peskin founded his organization in 1981 as a resource for block captains like himself who wanted to trade information.

“Watch groups can only do so much. They have quietly done a lot of what they were designed to do,” he said. He believes that the Neighborhood Watch mission should be limited to preventing break-ins.

Ex-chief Ed Davis, for one, has higher ambitions for his brainchild. What he had in mind all along was a working partnership between police and the good people they protect, fighting illegal activity together, in communities of every class and color. “It was supposed to be universal,” he said.

According to the Davis rules, citizens should be in constant touch with an officer they know. Police in turn are supposed to send suggestions based on what they hear up through the chain of command.

Those underpinnings disappeared in Los Angeles, he said, when he left the chief’s post. They never showed up, he added, in most places that picked up the Watch theory after Davis “licensed” it to the sheriffs’ organization in 1972. The reasons were various: from misunderstanding of the concept to resistance by officers who perceived the Watch as interference from civilians or a “lite” version of real police work.

The lofty goals, however, remained part of the conventional Watch wisdom. And, though there have been many success stories, the separation of the means from the ends also led to problems.

In the early 1980s, a Northwestern University team examined Watch organizing in four Chicago neighborhoods, all middle class but experiencing racial or economic transition. The researchers expected the experience to increase optimism about the communities, help residents get to know each other, make them feel safer and reduce actual crime. Most of their results showed the opposite happening. The siege mentality actually intensified.

When the scholars compared the Watch areas to citywide surveys, they found no evidence that block groups made a difference at all.

This method of community crime prevention, they concluded in a 1988 book about their observations, “fails for the most part to offer a workable or meaningful solution.”

Those were fighting words back then. Rosenbaum, who was one of the professors involved, said he was harshly criticized for writings that questioned the Watch.

Now, he has company. “Neighborhood Watch is kind of passe,” said Bonnie Bucqueroux, associate director of the National Center for Community Policing at Michigan State University.

As violent crime spreads beyond pockets in large cities to middle-sized towns and suburbia, the lessons being learned in the Walnut Parks of America can be applied to other types of areas as well.

“The problem is changing,” said Lin Squires, a founder of Mad About Rising Crime in the San Fernando Valley. Where Squires lives, in Chatsworth, traditional Neighborhood Watch is “an excellent piece of the puzzle,” she said. “But it’s limited. We need more.”

While she belongs to a Watch on her block, Mad About Rising Crime also sponsors softball leagues at local parks and offers counseling to parents and teens with troubled relationships. “Its focus,” she said, “is on trying to create crime-resistant neighborhoods, to look at what caused this drastic situation and change that.”

*

Late last year, Calvin Bailey vowed to try the Watch again. With the police stepping up their community effort, there was more backup around, he told himself, and it could work.

In January, he stopped at each of his block’s 21 houses, even the seven where he knew that narcotics dealers were at work. He explained his intentions.

This time, the meetings would be held in public buildings, not in private homes. But it wasn’t enough of a change. On the first official evening of the new, improved Watch, in the community room at Walbridge Elementary School, Bailey sat by himself for an hour before giving up.

For two months, no one came. By the third month, he had drawn only three people.

Bailey decided he needed a gimmick. He researched city programs and printed up a handbill advertising that the next Watch meeting would feature information about grass seeds and paint. Seventeen people--a record--showed up. “They thought that something was coming free,” he said, chortling at the memory.

With that triumph, the old flow of threats resumed.

The messages were delivered, on the street or at the corner store, by people he knew slightly, by just their first name or their last.

“You better watch your back,” warned Andre.

“Get home before it’s dark,” Mrs. Simmons said.

“They gonna get you. They know you snitching.” This time it was Mike.

In the dark morning hours of April 20, Bailey woke smelling smoke. He made his way from his bedroom to the living room, which was on fire. He walked outside and saw a spine of flame flickering on the wall. Peering at its source on the roof, he remembers, he realized, “It’s one of them cocktail bombs.” Molotov’s recipe: gasoline in a bottle, a rag for a wick.

Everyone escaped. Calvin and Denise; Calvin Jr., 15; Dana, 13; Devin, 4; Carlton, 2.

The fire gave off a vivid glow. The sirens wailed at ear-blasting level. Bailey noticed, however, that nobody on the block was looking out to see what had happened. “We report suspicious activity,” indeed.

“After all I’ve done,” he thought and for the first time, bitterness stirred.

“Get me the U-Haul,” said his wife, Denise, half-hysterical. It was time to give up, to flee the house where they had spent the last 10 years. That night, lying beside her husband in a hotel near the airport, she sobbed for a very long time.

But in the morning, she said, “I’m staying.” She didn’t want to move.

Then came a brief, heartening period.

Without being asked, Khatib Waheed corralled some of his regular marchers for guard duty at the house. In pairs, they worked four-hour shifts.

After two days, one asked, “Khatib, man, how long we gotta do this?” But Waheed insisted that they continue. “This is a Waterloo,” he said, “for this family and for us.”

Bailey’s employer donated a new roof. Another company installed gray carpeting and contributed linoleum for a new kitchen floor.

With all the scrutiny from the media and City Hall, drug activity stopped. And on April 28, the Baileys held a Neighborhood Watch meeting. Thirty-three people showed up.

Some, like Alderman Carter, were elected officials. Some were pastors. Amazingly, however, most were locals. They came from other blocks of Emerson and from Alcott, the next street over.

One was Robert Keys, 55 years old, tall and bespectacled. The crime had been getting to him. “I was thinking of just packing up and going,” he said. “I figured I’m alone. What can I do? I’m one person.”

The firebombing changed his mind. It was Calvin Bailey’s turn to be an inspiration.

But recent Watch meetings have attracted only 10 people, and the peace is over.

Police are sure they know who pitched the firebomb onto Bailey’s roof and also who commissioned and paid him with one or perhaps two $20 rocks of cocaine. But there’s no prosecutable case; their witness is too scared to step forward.

For weeks now, every night at about 10 p.m., the shooting has started up on Emerson Street. The drug dealers are back on the job.

When Denise Bailey steps out on her porch to sweep up, she hears the comments: “She thinks she’s too good to talk to anybody.”

Rumors are spreading about Calvin, that he sold his share of narcotics himself in the past. And the No. 1 rule at the Baileys’ house is that the children, for their own safety, must stay indoors.

*

Official Neighborhood Watch handbooks recommend that residents leave outside lights burning at night, and offer tips about locks and window bars. Ask block captains in Walnut Park what advice they would add and they come up with suggestions like these:

* Print two agendas, the real one and the censored backup prepared in case a stranger or someone obviously untrustworthy shows up. An alternative: the “meeting before the meeting.”

* Forget the “phone tree.” Be careful about who gets your number.

* Even though the police say they won’t stop first at your house if you call in a complaint, they do it all the time. Then you’ve been fingered as the snitch. Don’t phone 911 cold (your address will show up) unless it’s a matter of life and death. Instead, contact someone in the department that you know.

* When the adults stop providing information (and they will when they get scared), buy a bunch of Freeze-Pops for the children, who will snack on your front stoop and fill you in on the latest goings-on.

* At the least, joining Neighborhood Watch means some of your neighbors will whisper that you’re mean, self-righteous, or priggish, or all three. At worst, you could get hurt.

“God takes care of babies and fools,” Maria Paschal said. “That’s how I cope with fear.”