Andreatta: Cops and manners on Short Street

There was nothing welcoming about the stoop on Short Street. It was carpeted with green artificial turf and had a thick metal chain wrapped around the wooden railing.

The three young black men on the landing were scrawny, but imposing in their own way. One had no shirt and didn't seem bothered by the evening chill that had the approaching cops and clergymen bundled up.

"What you want?" one in a hoodie demanded. The clergymen didn't answer. They just walked through the chain-link gate and up onto the porch like everything was awesome.

It wasn't.

Local media on Monday played up the Clergy on Patrol initiative as the dawning of a new age between the Rochester Police Department and "the community." None defined "the community" as poor black people, but that's what we're talking about.

The two sides have been living in a powder keg since the shooting death of Officer Daryl Pierson and the emergence of a video showing an officer beating a cowering man on Genesee Street. In both altercations, the cops were white and the suspects were black.

Realizing that Rochester police have zero street cred across a wide swath of the city, City Hall asked church leaders to help bridge the gap. It's a concept that's been tried before and has merit because church leaders have a lot of sway in some neighborhoods.

So, for an hour last week, small groups of cops and clergy walked an impoverished section of town selling community relations and handing out pamphlets highlighting city recreation and job training programs.

Reporters were invited to observe, and I joined an inconspicuous group away from the television cameras following high-profile clusters led by Mayor Lovely Warren and Police Chief Michael Ciminelli.

You might have seen news footage of officers shooting the breeze with grandmothers and business owners, and Warren and Ciminelli declaring the effort a success. Warren said cops and clergy would walk together again in the spring.

Maybe they made inroads. I sincerely hope they did.

But on that Short Street stoop was a failure worth noting.

The two white officers in the group didn't follow the clergymen past the chain-link gate to greet those young black men. They didn't extend their hand to them or introduce themselves.

Those young men didn't exactly roll out the welcome mat. But it was their house, and a bunch of strange men, two of them in uniforms the young men distrust, had just popped by out of nowhere.

The cops stood there on the sidewalk the way cops do when they mean business — arms crossed and eyeballing those young men. The officers knew they weren't wanted, and they looked as though they didn't want to be there.

After a few uncomfortable minutes of the clergymen giving their best sales pitch with no backup from the police, the young men asked them to leave, and they did.

I walked away wondering what those young men thought about what just happened.

Two days later, I returned to Short Street to ask them.

"What you want?" a man barked through the door. I apologized for intruding, then spent five minutes explaining myself to a woman through a crack in the door before two of the men I saw on the stoop came out onto the green turf.

They appeared much more fragile in the morning light than they did at dusk, and I realized they were just kids.

Their names were David Brock, 19, and Joshua Albarran, 18. They're sort of related in that Albarran's brother has a child with Brock's sister.

They're high school dropouts and unemployed and have criminal histories. Court records show they were convicted in the robbery of a woman in 2013.

And they don't like cops because, as Brock put it, "They think they just high and mighty and everybody else is just rag dolls." They told me cops have stopped and frisked them for no good reason, pushed them around and stolen money from them.

I'm not sure I believed everything they said about the police.

It doesn't matter whether I believe their stories, though. They believe them, and there are tens of thousands of poor black people in Rochester who believe them.

That's why the cops have no street cred.

If Clergy on Patrol is going to succeed, police officers need to make an effort to connect with people who distrust them, like Brock and Albarran, rather than chat up grandmothers and business owners who are already on their side.

That takes time, way more time than a seasonal one-hour walking tour.

Those officers on Short Street stood there with what Brock and Albarran called "mean muggers," dour faces that said my boss made me be here.

I asked Brock and Albarran how the interaction could have been improved.

Brock shook my hand and demonstrated: "If they just come, 'Hi, my name is Officer Such-and-such and we're here on behalf of Lovely Warren, this and that, it'd have been more, you know, 'Oh, okay.' You feel me?"

I felt him.

"It's all about how you greet people, basically," Brock added.

We spoke for a half-hour on that stoop. As I left, I asked if I could visit again if I were ever in the neighborhood.

They said I was welcome.