Research has supported this social-minded approach. In his new book, Uneasy Peace, Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, documents how the dramatic drop in crime starting in the 1990s, which took place nationwide, corresponded with an increase in the number of nonprofits serving high-crime areas. That drop had previously been attributed, by politicians such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, and many others, to aggressive policing tactics that emerged from the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement. “Broken windows”—the idea that small infractions left unchecked lead to a collapse in social order—was first introduced by criminologists George Kelling and James Wilson in The Atlantic in 1982. “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” Kelling and Wilson wrote. “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares.” In the 1990s, the widespread adoption of “broken windows” policing resulted in the criminalization of panhandlers, loitering teens, and pot smokers; it contributed to the War on Drugs, the 1994 Clinton crime bill, the Los Angeles Police Department’s rampaging CRASH unit, the horrors of “Giuliani time” in New York, and a police department in Chicago that demonstrated “no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” according to an independent review in 2016.

But there is another way to interpret Kelling and Wilson’s findings. If a window is broken, police can arrest the person who broke it, but they can also help repair it. Sharkey believed that what makes areas safer is police who partner with the kind of nonprofits that do the “broken windows” work of maintaining social order—cleaning up trash, creating youth programs, helping people find jobs. Many departments are slowly beginning to understand “broken windows” in this way. In Los Angeles, a new policing program credits officers not for arrests but for walking their beats, often teaming up with former gang members to stop violence, and working with civic groups to start soccer leagues and develop health initiatives. The areas patrolled by these “guardian” officers have seen the steepest declines in crime of any Los Angeles districts. Rockford is hoping for similar results.

On a sunny day last October, Thurmond and Turner were preparing to host a Halloween event at one of the precincts. They had been living in the community for five months at that point, and “Pumpkins with the Police” was the third large function they had organized. They traded anxious calls throughout the day to figure out whether they had enough pumpkins and how to pay for additional ones. The ROCK program didn’t have a budget, and the two officers regularly spent time soliciting donations from local businesses. When Thurmond arrived at the station house to set up, the contents of his trunk spoke to the wide-ranging job he was now undertaking: Next to a tumbleweed of police tape, collected from a recent homicide scene, were three plastic bags from Walmart filled with cookies, plastic cups, and napkins.

Pumpkins with the Police was being held in a gymnasium at a station that had previously been an abortion clinic, and before that a school. At one end of the gym, pumpkins the size of basketballs awaited their fate. Bales of hay were stacked against the opposite wall, in front of a “Rockford Police Department” backdrop. A young white woman with five children, the youngest of them a baby she carried on her hip, showed up 30 minutes before the event’s start time, announcing that she had nowhere else to wait after picking up her kids from school. Thurmond greeted her with a smile, leading two of her boys to a beanbag toss in the center of the basketball court. The woman said she appreciated the station house being opened for them. Over the next hour, 30 other families arrived. The children sat at folding tables with their pumpkins, scooping out the goopy innards. One of the kids recognized Thurmond from his school and waved. Other police officers were there as volunteers, most of them in uniform, though one of the women from the precinct had on a sweatshirt that said: I STAND BEHIND THE THIN BLUE LINE. Turner’s teenage daughter passed out cider and cookies. A pregnant African American woman shooed away her five-year-old son, deflecting his pleas for her help with his pumpkin: “You need to ask one of the police to carve it.”