I took a walk Wednesday night with residents of the Patterson Park neighborhood to look at issues of crime and grime. Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III and Mayor Sheila Dixon went along.

These walks are almost a nightly occurrence in Baltimore these days, and I know the mayor and police chief try to get to as many as they can. They always attract a crowd, but more importantly little things get quickly noticed and handled. Dixon, for example, spotted a mattress in an alley. She quickly turned the guy trailing her with his notebook open and made sure he made note. I'm sure someone at public works is getting an urgent call.

As with most of these walks, we didn't see crime. But that's not the point. Thirty people trailing the mayor through back alleys shows everyone else that people are concerned and willing to stand up. "Banding together is what will revitalize our neighborhood," Tyrel Mosness, the security chair for the Patterson Park Neighborhood Association, told Dixon.

This is one of the important neighborhoods in the city. North of booming Canton, large rowhouses once left for ruin have been reclaimed, as has the sprawling park. Gone are the drug dealers and prostitutes; Wednesday night, under the lights, cheers roared from soccer games and people pushing baby carriages strolled on the paths.

At the Patterson Park library, Dixon met with Kelly McPhee, who has started a new community association, United at Liberty Square, and she talked about members get out nearly every Saturday morning and clean alleys from Lakewood Avenue all the way up to Orleans Street. She handed out a sheet of paper listing various projects and concerns, such as drains being repaired, cracked sidewalks, diseased trees and graffiti.

I liked the association's new signs on trash cans: "Trash goes here. Believe it or not, not everyone seems to realize that."

Bealefeld stopped to chat with Jacquelyn Fisher who poked her head out of a side door of Horsefeathers Bar. She told him she used to head a police community council, that she used to run a talent show to get kids off the street. Bealefeld asked her, "Why is all this stuff 'used to?'"

Fisher answered: "Cause things are different now. It's not like it used to be. I stopped doing it in '94 cause a lot of things changed. But I'm ready to start back up again, in May."

Bealefeld and Dixon inspected a large brick flower pot attached to an abandoned building, the flowers replaced by mounds of trash. The commissioner then noticed a door open on the second floor of the back of a rowhouse being renovated. Scaffolding invited anyone to simply climb up and get inside.

"This is where we get smashed and your neighborhood gets smashed," Bealefeld told Mosness. "They'll leave a saw or they'll leave a miter box or some drill. Somone will climb up there and they'll steal that ... and this neighborhood will get hit with a property crime."

On that note, the most recent crime stats released by the department show a 12 percent drop in crimes that include robbery, assault, murder (though murders themselves are up about 16 percent this year) and theft. Assaults with guns are down 10 percent and robberies with guns are down 19 percent. The department should have a news conference any day announcing the first-quarter crime stats, which are down.

But it's the little things seen on Wednesday's walk that drive neighborhoods crazy. And obviously the mayor and police commissioner can't get to every walk every day. Hopefully, the aides who take note of the abandoned mattress and the open door learn why these complaints are so important, and the next time someone calls 311 to report trash piling up in an alley they respond that much faster.