Page6-The Michigan Daily- Friday, September 6, 1991
On the street
beat, police use
pedal patrol

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by Melissa Peerless
Daily Crime Reporter
Some University students equate
police with speeding tickets and
breaking up good parties - all
things they'd rather do without.
But the Ann Arbor Police De-
partment (AAPD) is trying to
change that image by implementing
a new "community policing" pol-
icy.
The Special Problems Unit, or
SPUDS, is a company made up of
five officers who are trying to show
students, and other Ann Arbor resi-
dents, the benefits of being pro-
iected by a police force.
Lt. Jim Tieman said, "We are try-
ing to get a little closer to the stu-
dents. What we are doing in this area
is combining old ideas with new
technology. It's just a new name on
something that has been used before.
We want to get back in touch with
the community."
'The main goal is to
keep the rowdiness
down to a dull riot.
The reason we use
the bikes is that it's
much faster than
walking and less
intimidating than a
patrol car'
- Lt. Jim Tieman
As part of the "community
policing" program, a team of two
bicycle-riding police officers has
been established to patrol campus at
bight.
"The main goal is to keep the
rowdiness down to a dull riot. We
patrol the area near bars and parties.
The reason we use the bikes is that
it's much faster than walking and
less intimidating than a patrol car,"
Tieman said.
: He added that the department al-
ready considers the program, which
began Wednesday night, to be a suc-
cess.
"Students are more apt to come
up to a police officer when he is sit-
ting on a bike on the corner. It
doesn't seem to be that big of a
deal," he said.
Another aspect of "community
policing" involves the delegation of
police officers to specific areas of
Ann Arbor. This replaces a method

in which officers rotated from
neighborhood to neighborhood on a
nightly basis.
Tieman said the police decided to
change to this patrolling method in
order to better serve Ann Arbor res-
idents.
"We will still be available for
your crimes, for your car accidents;
for your emergencies. Now, we will
be able to respond better to the
lesser calls too - the noise com-
plaints, the quality-of-life type is-
sues," he said.
One of the patrol areas is com-
prised of south Ann Arbor, from
Hill St. to Burns Park, and from
Tappan Ave. to Olivia St. The resi-
dences in this area are primarily in-
habited by students. The officers as-
signed to this section of town, Offi-
cers Cogghe and Forbes, have been
dealing with common problems of
families who live near students.
"Last night, we talked to the
presidents of fraternities in that
area. We also talked to the neigh-
bors of the fraternities. Now the
frats are planning to tell the neigh-
bors when they have parties," Cog-
ghe said.
Tieman added that the police are
also trying to help the students in
their concerns.
"Frats have a real problem with
bicycle larceny. We are trying to
figure out a way to actually bring
the registering material to the fra-
ternity houses and register all of the
bikes with the city of Ann Arbor,"
he said.
Tieman said that the department
has implemented this program now
because the time is ripe in Ann Ar-
bor to improve police-resident rela-
tions.
"It's certainly not like it was
when I started on the police force in
the 1970s. From the students, it was
'We hate police.' From the police, it
was 'Stop the students from riot-
ing.' There has been a positive move
from both sides. We would never
deny the students the right to speak
their piece or to protest. They have
respect for us. It's more flexibility
versus the old hard-fisted days."
During the next few months, the
AAPD plans to implement some
more new programs and fine-tune
the existing ones.
"Around the first of the year, we
plan to hold a seminar for city offi-
cials, community members and Uni-
versity officials to introduce what
the police department is doing in
this area," Tieman said.

Goat anti-body may
help heart patients

WASHINGTON (AP) - Up to
40 percent of operations to open
clogged arteries fail when the ves-
sels develop new blockages. Now a
laboratory study with rats shows
that an antibody may prevent this
problem,.offering new hope for hu-
man heart disease patients.
Researchers at the University of
Washington say they used an anti-
tody extracted from goats to keep
arteries clear in rats that underwent
a procedure called angioplasty, an
operation commonly used in human
heart disease to open up blocked ves-
sels.
A report on the research is to be
published today in the journal
Science.
Dr. Russell Ross, principal sci-
entist in the study, said the research
is based on the theory that a natural
substance called platelet derived
growth factor, or PDGF, plays a
dole in new blockages that develop
inside repaired arteries.
The blockages are a common
problem in the treatment of heart
patients.
About half a million Americans
annually receive operations to open
arteries that have narrowed due to
cardiovascular disease. These opera-
tions include bypasses, in which ves-
sels are implanted to permit blood
to flow around a blockage, and an-
gioplasties, in which a small bal-
loon is threaded into a blocked

because it goes back to where it was
before or gets even worse," he said.
Earlier studies had suggested
that PDGF, which the body
produces to heal wounds, may play a
role in creating the blockages.
To test this theory, Ross and his
team first needed an antibody
against PDGF. They obtained this
substance by injecting human PDGF
into goats. The goats' immune sys-
tems responded by producing an an-
tibody which neutralizes the action
of PDGF.
The scientists then performed
angioplasty procedures on 39 rats.
"We used a balloon catheter, the
same kind of instrument that is used
in patients, except it was much
smaller since a rat is small," said
Ross. The balloon was inflated in a
neck artery of the rats, causing dam-
age to the vessels, just as occurs in
human angioplasty.
In half of the rats, the re-
searchers injected doses of the
PDGF antibody, The other rats, used
as a controls, received another goat
antibody.
The result, said Ross, is that 41
percent of the rats which received
the anti-PDGF substance did not de-
velop blocked arteries at the angio-
plasty site. Arteries in the rats that
did not get the anti-PDGF thickened
and narrowed, he said.
Asked if he thought the tech-
nique could be used to help human

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