As a full-time civilian employee of the Oakland Police Department, Brekke-Miesner is responsible for coordinating efforts between the community and the police. Brekke-Miesner helps the community stay involved in reducing crime and promoting citizens’ safety.

Community Policing started in Oakland in 1994. Each of the city's 57 police beats has its own Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, except four that are mainly industrial areas. Each council has one neighborhood service coordinator, who works for the Oakland Police Department.

Last year, when Valerie Winemiller of North Oakland came to Brekke-Miesner with evidence of criminal activity at a local spa, he jumped into action.

Winemiller had a stack of police reports on her desk of failed attempts to close the spa, called New Beginnings, at 40th and Broadway. Neighbors suspected was actually a drug and prostitution operation.

With Brekke-Miesner's help, Winemiller collected police reports, city staff reports and letters from the former city manager. Brekke-Miesner, a tall, slim middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair and a well-groomed beard, began staked out the spa and saw the suspicious happenings himself.

Accoridng to the city's community policing model, this is when Brekke-Miesner and other community members respond. Brekke-Miesner calls the problem-solving officer, Michael Trenkamp, an Oakland police officer designated to assist North Oakland. He spends his time learning about the community and working with its members to solve crime-related issues.

Trenkamp takes the problem to others in the department, asking for help in devising a plan of attack and manpower to carry it out. If the problem happens to be on Piedmont Avenue, he contacts the Piedmont Avenue walking officer, Marcus Moreno.

The key for Moreno and Trekamp, as well as other officers who fill similar roles in other neighborhoods, is to to take the time to get to know their assigned community.

Moreno can be found patrolling merchant-lined Piedmont Avenue from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily. Trenkamp comes to all the neighborhood watch meetings where he reports to community members and listens to issues they bring up.

“You can’t have community policing if you don’t have a well-developed neighborhood watch," Brekke-Miesner said. "I can’t walk into a neighborhood and know what is wrong.”

He added: “People understand [even] if you have a cop on every corner, you still have crime. We’re not going to ever have a cop on every corner. Cops tend to respond; they don’t prevent everything. People here are about intervention and early prevention.”

Opponents of community policing question whether his time is well-spent and whether the system works. Evidence citied in a 2004 report, Fairness and Effectiveness of Policing by the National Academies Committee on Crime and Justice, suggests that community policing does not work as well as people want to believe it does. The report concludes that community policing programs don't reduce crime as much as they reduce people’s fear of crime.

Community policing also presents a lot of hoops to jump through.

“We all wish we could just phone in a complaint and have it go away," wrote North Oakland crime watchdog Winemiller in an e-mail. "I don't know what it would take for that to happen." Stopping crime involves lots of community leaders' time; solid work from the police and the neighborhood council; consistent monitoring to ensure complaints don't fall through the cracks; and lots of community participation.

“If anything breaks down in the formula," she wrote, "the project does not succeed.”

Claudia Albano, the Neighborhood Services Manager with the City Administrator’s Office and Brekke-Miesner’s boss, said the system is beset with a great deal of bureaucracy, but the power lies in the people.

“The beauty of the system is that it is … about getting people to understand," she said. "The more responsible people are the better it will be.”

Resident Ronlie Lahati said she believes in the system. “It works. It really works," she said.

“This is a very quiet neighborhood. When you look at our stats you don’t see murder, murder, murder. But the whole idea is that if you don’t get involved, you don’t have a clue. But that is not to say we don’t have problems,” she said.

On September 20 at 4:45 pm, one such problem shook the neighborhood and challenged its community policing system. On the 5300 block of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, 20-year-old Gary W. King, Jr. was shot twice in the back and killed by Oakland Police Sgt. Pat Gonzales. The officer later said he saw King reach for a concealed gun. Gonzales had stopped King to question him about another homicide because King matched the suspect's description. While the investigation into Sgt. Gonzales’ actions continues, Brekke-Miesner is dealing with community reaction.

The outcry over the shooting extended Brekke-Miesner’s already long hours – usually more than 60 hours a week.