This is what I call Get Out the Vote.

Six cops -- including a major, a deputy major and a sergeant -- and about eight residents of East Baltimore's Midway neighborhood were out tonight. The head of the community association, Cleaven Williams, 33, purposely chose this night to combine fighting crime with hitting the polls (for the record, the police were there to help keep the walkers safe -- it's their show).

Starting about 6 p.m. with a prayer in front of Cecil Elementary School, they walked side streets and main thoroughfares, such as Greenmount and Homewood avenues, chatted with people and left fliers advertising more community meetings in people's doors. Williams brought along his 7-year-old son Malik to help. "I don't shield him," he said, as Malik bounded stairs and onto porches to hand out the fliers.

This is part of Maj. Melvin Russell's plan as he commands the Eastern District, which has shown the sharpest drop in homicides and shootings in the city in the past six months. In fact, after the walk was over, Russell, an ordained minister, led a prayer and noted that in one hour, "We didn't hear a single gunshot."

They were just blocks from where six people got shot back in September. On this night, even streets such as Greenmount Avenue was clear of people. Russell talked with a man sipping water in front of a corner store. The man complained of vacant rowhouses, and Russell handed him a flier for the next community meeting. "You come and talk to me," he said.

At the end of the walk, sirens screamed as fire engines raced to a house fire on Oakhill Avenue, just off East North Avenue near Greenmount Cemetery. The second floor of a house was on fire; the occupant, a woman, wasn't inside, but several people on the walk knew her and said they had just spoken to her earlier that evening.

In his final prayer, Russell asked that she be taken care of and get back "double of what she had lost." The walk ended in the rain, outside Cecil Elementary, with about 45 minutes still left to vote.