BY ROB KAISER
The Cincinnati Enquirer

COVINGTON - Damian Oden and Stacey Walton have nothing in common except the tough cop who keeps a wary eye on them both.

Covington police Sgt. Spike Jones wants to keep it that way. It's why he watches the two so closely: to make sure 5-year-old Damian's life doesn't mimic that of such residents as Mr. Walton, a store owner in Damian's neighborhood who's under indictment on charges of assaulting a police officer and being a persistent felony offender.

When you're an officer with the city's community policing program, you spend most of your time tracking the innocent.

"Keep this one off the streets," he tells Damian's great-grandmother, laying his hand gently on the boy's head.

Residents fight back

The streets of Covington's east side are full of bad examples: teen-agers shooting dice and guns. Dealing drugs. Brawling. Mostly they hang out at the corner of Greenup and Robbins streets.

It's gotten so bad that law-abiding neighborhood residents have begun banding together, too. They're talking about how to take back the neighborhood, but they're also airing complaints about perceived police brutality.

The men and women of Covington's community-policing unit aren't just at the center of this storm. They are the center of this storm. Their jobs were established almost two years ago as a way of improving relations between the department and neighborhoods such as the east side.

But perhaps more importantly, those officers you see on bikes are practicing a different method of crimefighting: They concentrate on warding off trouble rather than reacting to it.

It's not easy. On the east side, even some store owners don't like police. At the corner of Robbins and Greenup is a grocery covered with graffiti, including gang symbols. Nobody bothers to scrub it off. "The store hasn't been very cooperative in working with us," Sgt. Jones says.

Sometimes he takes it upon himself to sweep the empty beer cans and other piles of trash from the sidewalk in front. The place isn't open and won't be till after noon. It's a popular hangout at night, though; later, the sidewalk in front will teem with teen-agers. A block down the street, Mr. Walton is pulling up in front of his store, Stacey's Video Plus. He rolls his eyes when he sees Sgt. Jones coming.

"I like to see the patrol. I wish they'd hang out in front of my store all day long," Mr. Walton says.

But his tone and demeanor suggest otherwise. The tension between Mr. Walton and Sgt. Jones is thick.

'I can't take it'

"He thinks he's a role model," Sgt. Jones says. But the 5-foot-7 cop sees it as his duty to insinuate himself between the burly businessman and those who might follow in his footsteps.

And so he visits the little green house on Garrard Street.

"Is your grandma here?" Sgt. Jones asks Damian Oden as he pokes his head in the side door. Ruth Oden, 78, lives directly across the street from the east side's community-policing substation. On one wall of her living room hangs a picture of The Last Supper. On the opposite wall is a Lite Beer clock.

Mrs. Oden might be the police department's biggest fan in this neighborhood. It's important to have a strong police presence, she says. "You know how it is around here."

It's like this: Things are so bad that some east side residents have given up. As Sgt. Jones visits with Mrs. Oden, Katie Evans, 39, stands in the rain a few blocks away, at the corner of Robbins and Greenup. She twirls a green and white umbrella against the gloom, waiting; a friend is on the way with a U-Haul to help her move out of her east side apartment.

"I can't take it no more," she says. "The loud noises, the rude kids, the filth in the building."

Ms. Evans paid $375 a month for the apartment, and for what? To live on the worst corner Covington has to offer in a building filled with graffiti and the smell of urine. Her apartment was broken into three times. She decided not to pay her rent in a deliberate attempt to get the landlord to evict her, so desperate was she to break her lease after a month. And now she's bound for Florence.

Florence doesn't have neighborhoods. It has subdivisions.

Worth preserving

Covington, being an older city, has true neighborhoods. One is the east side. Another is the area where Sgt. Jones grew up.

The 31-year-old police officer knows the importance of neighborhoods in this Northern Kentucky city, where the houses squat staring across narrow streets and everybody uses side doors. He lives just a few doors down from the house where he grew up on 17th Street. He met his fiance at the video store. She grew up on 20th.

And so the fight for the east side must go on. Even tortured neighborhoods have something worth preserving in this age of fragmentation and impermanence. And that's why we're in Ruth Oden's living room today, visiting, with Sgt. Jones saying of Damian:

"Keep this one off the streets."

"I'll do my best," Ruth Oden says as her washing machine whines loudly into the spin cycle.

Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears regularly on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.
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