My colleague Justin Fenton wrote a story in today's Baltimore Sun about a new initiative in the Northern District to get more officers walking the beat and riding on bicycles. This brought back fond memories of Jake the Snake.

When I covered the city police department in the mid and late 1990s, Jake the Snake called me every once in a while. He was a nice man, not unlike many others who developed a relationship with a reporter to push a cause. All Jake the Snake wanted to talk about was the importance of foot patrols.

I'm ashamed to admit I never took the time to meet Jake the Snake, and I didn't even learn his real name until a columnist here wrote about him in April 1997. He died that December at the age of 70. The lead paragraph of his obituary described him as a "strong advocate for police officers on foot patrol." His real name was Alvin H. Johnson.

He was remembered by police commissioners, mayors, prosecutors, community leaders and neighbors for his work. He was a frequent caller to radio talk shows. He knew he didn't have the solution to crime, but he believed that drive-by policing didn't accomplish anything. He wanted officers to stop their cars, climb out and talk with people. Let folks know they are there for the community and interested in their lives. The good people will talk back and invite them in for coffee. The bad people will leave, and stay away even when the officer is gone. To Johnson, policing was more about caring than making arrests.

"The criminal knows it's no cop on the beat," he told a Baltimore Sun reporter in 1997. "When he sees the car go by, he knows it's open season to commit a crime. If they knew or had an idea a cop was walking the street, the criminal would have a second thought."

Police commissioners and mayors I talked with, starting with Kurt L. Schmoke, all wanted more officers out walking. But they always argued they never had enough. A cop on foot can't get to many crimes quickly enough. Can't back up another officer. Can't patrol a wide area. It's a huge uses of resources best left for places where there are lots of people in a small area, such as the Inner Harbor. When Peter G. Angelos wanted foot patrol officers outside one of his developments along Charles Street, he paid for the overtime.

But as Justin's story points out, the business owners along Greenmount Avenue liked the idea of what amounted to having their own private officer. The police union president complained that other parts of the district might suffer, and other officers in need of help won't find it.

It's always a delicate balancing act. There are never enough cops, enough firefighters, enough teachers. And so administrators try to make do. After two people were killed in Federal Hill, the police commander of the Southern District created a bicycle unit to help shut the park down at 11 p.m. and patrol surrounding streets. Maj. Scott L. Bloodsworth said he then started getting calls from other neighborhoods, Cherry Hill, Westport and Brooklyn, where crime is high, worried that they would lose officers because of rare violence in a more affluent neighborhood. Bloodsworth said he did no such thing -- the bike unit is made up of newly assigned officers fresh from the academy. If anything, he said Federal Hill probably got less police than it should have because officers were away patrolling higher-crime areas.

That's the problem. Keep police chasing crime from one place to the next and you leave a place vulnerable. The police union president, Paul Blair, praised police commanders recently for NOT doing that. Additional officers are assigned to East, West and Northwest Baltimore to quell homicides. When a recent spurt of shootings hit the Southwest, those other squads didn't move in. They stayed put. In years past, such squads moved with the crime, and ended up chasing the bodies all year. Homicides are on pace this year for a 20-year low.

In the end, it's a numbers game. But you can't measure crime that doesn't happen. Let's imagine this scenario. After two weeks riding bicycles up and down Greenmount Avenue, officers Tivon Green and Karl Paige II haven't made a single arrest. But, in that same time period, there isn't a single robbery, break-in, assault or drug deal?

Will they be deemed unproductive and moved someplace else? Or will they be deemed a success because they kept a lid on crime? After all, isn't that what the police are supposed to do?