CARE SELLS ITSELF

The working committee chose one platoon in the department to be the first to adopt the system. "We played `Call In a Police Report' with them," George said. The game showed the patrol officers that the system was on their side. They filed complete, legible reports with no information missing. They didn't need a pen. And all the words were spelled right. Soon, George said, operators were discovering that patrol officers were calling in reports on other than property crimes. "The officer would say this was a property crime, and half way through, the operator would discover it was really an assault." Soon, the other platoons were demanding that they be given the system and training in its use. Even the detective division wanted it.

George had been right. The idea would sell itself if marketed properly. "Had it failed, the reason would have been failure to plan," he said later. "The idea was bulletproof. It would only fail if we let it fail. We sold it to this core that we hand-selected. Then they became salesmen."

Yet such is the police culture that all along the interest had been mixed with a fundamental reluctance to change. "Even after you have a successful program, even after we got the innovations award, people I talked to in other cities were searching for reasons not to do it; for reasons why it wouldn't work in their communities." Still, the word got out that it did work. By the autumn of 1989, roughly 90 cities had expressed interest in CARE. George and Kleinknecht enjoy watching other departments get interested in their program. "Larger police departments find it hard to sit still hearing from a small, midwestern department," George said. "But if they listen, soon you see the light go on."