The invasion and robbery of Bailey’s jewelry store in Raleigh’s Cameron Village in broad daylight may have been prevented if mounted police were on patrol in the shopping center. 

Way back in the mid-1980s I was involved in creating a horse patrol as chairman of Raleigh’s Downtown Advisory Committee when the center city was considered a toxic DMZ by the majority of area citizens. Raleigh had grown outward by then, and old-line city-dwellers could not forget the riots and fires downtown when Martin Luther King Jr was killed in 1968.

By then the old and comfortable downtown had nearly disappeared anyway. Most of the shops had moved to outlying shopping centers, leaving only vestiges of the way it used to be. The Sir Walter Hotel remained, but was soon to be purchased and later re-purposed as a senior assisted care facility, leaving behind memories of the hostelry as the political center of the state capital. The Ambassador Theatre barely hung on, and the popular S&W cafeteria closed.

Aping other US cities suffering from downtown atrophy, in the mid-70s Raleigh joined with Wake County and the State of North Carolina to fend off the inevitable by converting Fayetteville Street, the main drag, into a pedestrian mall. The concrete design added to the sense of despair. Retailers refused to lease and traffic problems increased. Tumbleweed could be imagined blowing across the bleak and desolate cityscape, another dismal failure of government planning.

Yet Raleigh’s heart kept beating from thousands of state workers flowing into downtown. Buildings were erected in the “state government complex” north of the Old Capitol, keeping a portion of the center city alive. But it came with a cost, and reminded Raleighites who was boss. Laid out from scratch in 1792 as the nation’s only planned state capital city, Raleigh was literally owned by the state, as were the streets.

Demonstrating their contempt for a separate identify of the City, the commissars who came to govern in Raleigh made the decision in the mid-70s to turn the main streets radiating out from the Capitol one-way express arteries. New Bern Avenue, Edenton Street and Hillsborough Street (named for former capital cities of the state) and internal roads - including Salisbury, Wilmington and Person - were also altered to one direction. With Dawson and McDowell streets already one-way running right by the city core, most of downtown became a fly-by ghetto.

With its arteries blocked and neglected by its own citizens and state government bureaucrats, downtown was barely breathing in 1980. But all around for miles and miles the region was undergoing a renaissance. The Research Triangle Park served as the catalyst for high quality population growth, spawning mega-suburbs. The question became, can we truly be living in a sophisticated metropolis when the state capital’s center city was slipping into oblivion?

Enter Mayor Smedes York, in a huge irony the son of Willie York, the man who instigated retail flight from downtown well before the woes of the 1970s by conceiving and building Cameron Village in the early 1950s, the first Planned Unit Development in the Southeast. Smedes York understood downtown was the symbol of the city’s new identity as the centerpiece of the emerging Research Triangle region. He appointed me - then editor and publisher of the Spectator weekly and later Triangle Business - chairman of a new downtown committee due to my efforts to promote the emerging regional reality.

Our committee took on many battles, many with the City, whose staff had their own agenda of “planning” downtown into failure. The mayor who followed York refused to allow restaurants to provide outside dining on the mall, and the City Manager cared little for the aesthetics required to draw people downtown. It was clear the State looked down its nose at efforts to rejuvenate “their” city and obfuscated progress, even claiming they owned the mall.

On the positive side, it was heartening to realize that dedicated souls had created small miracles not apparently visible in the urban context. Little by little, buildings were refurbished and exciting plans were underway to transform the old City Market and Moore Square into a “festival retail” complex, later thwarted by over-planning and micro-management by city officials. It became obvious redevelopment was obscure in comparison to raw land development, but it was happening - and laid the groundwork for the recent miracle visible in downtown after the mall was torn down and urban blood began to flow again.

These factors were critical, but nothing was more pressing than creating a sense of security downtown to allay the attitudes ingrained in the attitude of Raleigh’s suburban citizens. To face this problem, our committee interviewed mounted patrol officers and officials from Virginia Beach, Virginia. We learned that the visibility mounted officers have from their vantage is only half the story: more important is the visibility of the mounted officer by potential perpetrators. One horse can control 500 people in a potential riot situation, and serve as a go-between in bad neighborhoods where the police are the enemy. Mounted patrols provide shoppers and workers with a valid feeling of security and a sense of occasion, which in turn generates more visits downtown.

The City Manager turned down a proposal for horse patrols, and then changed his mind, saying that if private money was located, the City would match it. A fundraiser was held and horses donated (by Willie York himself) and the mounted patrol was born. Today, there are four horses and four officers who patrol downtown and city parks. NC State also maintains a horse patrol for its campus.

In our largely suburban footprint, horses are an effective way to provide security – in parking decks, large strip centers, concert venues and during public demonstrations and official events. The larger Triangle cities would find downtown safety greatly improved with mounted patrols, and Raleigh would benefit by expanding the horse patrol in downtown and across the city, perhaps in financial partnership with shopping centers and office parks. 

The new book Bringing Up Bebe addresses a phenomenon American visitors to France often notice: children there are better behaved. French kids are welcome in restaurants and cafes to the wonderment of visitors from the US. Author Pamela Druckerman says it’s because no means NO in France, and Gallic babies are allowed to cry until they stop on their own. With self-esteem the fashion in the US, we have a long way to go.

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Go to Amazon.com and enter Spies Among Us to purchase your copy of the 6-disc DVD set of the 7th Raleigh Spy Conference featuring keynote speaker and former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden on the lead-up to the capture and termination of Usama Bin Laden (or you can call Metro at 919-831-0999 or email Cyndi Harris.