By Barry Owens
One would think that a police officer in this town could pull worse duty than being assigned to College Hill. The neighborhood is leafy and quiet, but hardly shady. When there is a call for police, it is generally because something has gone missing from the garage, been lifted from a parked car, or sneaked through the backdoor.
“I love College Hill,” police officer John Ryan says a burglary suspect once told him. “People here are real good about locking their front doors, but not their back doors.”
Ryan is the community police officer for Beat 31—which includes the College Hill, Crown Heights, Uptown and New Salem neighborhoods, among others—and spends more time building relationships than writing reports. But those relationships are key, he said, to policing the neighborhood.
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