In the almost four years since regular police foot patrols stopped in the far South Side community of Roseland, crime has held steady there while dropping citywide.

Now some business owners and residents wonder if they've been forgotten.

Ledall Edwards' family has owned a menswear store on the 11300 block of South Michigan Avenue for 32 years. But since foot patrols have stopped, he said security along the commercial strip there has fallen noticeably.

"In the last few years I have seen more criminal activity than in all the prior years put together," said Edwards, who also serves as president of the Roseland Business Development Council.

Prostitution, drug dealing and robbery are a regular occurrence. That drives down business traffic, he said.

Foot patrols stopped in 2003 as police redeployed within the community to deal with a rash of murders, according to 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale.

The tactics worked well at first, as murders fell from 45 that year to 22 in 2004. But since then murders have crept back up, reaching 42 last year.

Other crime statistics for the Roseland area tell a complicated story. Since 2003 reports of aggravated assault and battery in the Chicago Police Department's Calumet district, which includes Roseland, have fallen twice as fast as in the city as a whole. But robbery and motor-vehicle theft rates have risen steadily at the same time.

Foot patrols are still part of the Chicago Police Department's strategy in Roseland, spokeswoman Monique Bond said, but she acknowledged they are used on a more "sporadic" basis.

Other South Side communities such as Hegewisch, South Chicago and Beverly have foot patrols through their main thoroughfares, according to business group representatives there.

Alice Collins, safety coordinator for the Beverly Area Planning Association, said the patrols help strengthen the relationship between the community and the police.

Beale has committed $360,000 to install 15 new police surveillance cameras in his ward, and is working to set up a separate camera network that residents and businesses can log into to watch over the neighborhood themselves.

Beale argues that crime rate is driven largely by gang conflict in the Altgeld Gardens-Murray Homes housing project, where residents relocated by the Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation are crossing street-gang boundaries as they change apartments.

That is where police resources were most needed, Beale said.

However, a look at the Web site Chicagocrime.org, which maps crime statistics released by the Police Department, suggests that trouble in the district may be more widespread.

The police warn that the data released through the site is incomplete and not final. But of the 30 homicides mapped by Chicagocrime.org in the Calumet district last year, only four happened in the Altgeld Gardens area, while the bulk took place farther north and west.