Four years ago, Micah Blackwell of Watts befriended community relations officers. Today, as he turns 13, they have become part of the family.

Their first encounter had the makings of a throwaway moment - a friendly cop on the community relations beat buddying up to a little boy when they crossed paths outside the Crenshaw Christian Center.

"I always make it a point to talk to kids," recalled LAPD Sgt. Ralph Morales. "We started chatting, I gave him some stickers. I asked his mom if I could give him my business card."

Nine-year-old Micah Blackwell studied the card, thanked the officer, then asked, "What time do you get to work?" At 7:30 the next morning, the telephone rang in Morales' office: "Good morning, sergeant. It was nice to meet you ... I really enjoyed talking to you."

"We wound up having a great conversation," Morales said. "He had a sense of humor, charisma ... It was hard to believe that this was a 9-year-old boy." Micah called again the next morning, and the next, and the next... If Morales wasn't in, he'd talk to Mike Lockett or Ruth Beadle or Derek Campbell. Before long, he got to know all the officers in the community relations office.

"His mother bought him a cellphone," Morales told me, "because Micah spent so much time talking to us, he was tying up the line at home." That was four years ago, and the calls still come.

With a million questions and a boatload of problems, Micah could have been considered a nuisance. Instead, the voluble kid growing up in Watts became a project. Today is Micah's 13th birthday, his transition from boy to young man. His story puts a new spin on an old notion: that it can take a village to raise a child. That village, it turns out, just might be a police department.

I met Micah when he was 11. LAPD Lt. Fred Booker had raved to me about this former foster child who moved police officers to tears when he spoke at Chief Bill Bratton's 2007 Religious Leaders Forum. Booker gave me a packet he'd put together, with photos, a bio - Micah's favorite color is red, his favorite food is pizza, his favorite sport is basketball - and reference letters from his teachers. It seemed a little over the top, until I met him.

He ushered me into his tiny tract home, where plants lined the window ledges and the air smelled Pine-Sol clean. He was friendly, polite and well-spoken. But an old soul quality set him apart, something hard to describe but easy to feel and see. "He's always been a caring, humble child," his mother, Belinda Cannon, told me. "Always paying attention to others' needs." A child who instinctively held the door open for old ladies at church and fearlessly handed out Bible tracts to young toughs on the basketball court.

"Ms. Belinda," as the police officers call her, is an old-school mother who demands "please" and "thank you" and will brook no back talk. The type who believes that any problem can be fixed with sincere prayer and a good heart-to-heart.

When her marriage failed and her four grown children left California, she became a foster mother. "I wanted to matter to somebody," she told me. "I believed I still had something to give." She took Micah in when he was 3 days old and adopted him a few years later. When she learned he had an infant brother in foster care, she adopted that baby. Joshua will be 6 next month.

She learned of Micah's relationship with Morales when she got a call from police. "I thought they were coming to get my boys," she says now, laughing at the memory. "I had been praying for weeks, 'God, give me somebody who's kind and can be a friend for my boys.'"

God, it seems, sent the LAPD.

When Micah turned 10, officers hosted his birthday party at the Police Academy. The next year, they raised money to pay his Christian-school tuition. Then, after Cannon used her Christmas shopping money to help a homeless family, officers showed up at her door with gifts for her boys and a Christmas tree.

By now, the relationship has grown far beyond the gifts and the parties, the photographs with Kobe Bryant and the visits to Chief Bratton's office. Cannon knows that as boys grow up, "there are questions they just can't ask a mom."

With the officers, Micah can unburden himself - talk about his struggles with math, a girl he likes, the guys who tease him because he doesn't curse or his sneakers are cheap.

"We tell him, 'Keep your head up, stay focused,'" Morales said. "He's a really decent young man ... and he's taught us something too - about honoring your commitment. When he says he will do something, he'll do it."

Caring for the boys has been a challenge for Cannon recently. She has survived two bouts with cancer, but doctors now say she is terminally ill. On Monday I visited her home with officers from the community relations team. She was seated on the couch, looking tired and weak. Micah knelt next to her. "What do you need, Mommy?" he asked softly whenever she paused, offering her a napkin or a drink.

A few hours later, Cannon was admitted to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Micah and Joshua went to stay at the Leimert Park home of Ted and Bonnie Hunt, a retired couple Cannon met at church last fall whom the boys now consider their grandparents.

No one wants to think much about what's ahead. "I think my mommy's going to be here for a very long time," Micah told me. When Cannon didn't come home Thursday, he worried mostly about her being alone. He didn't have to. Morales was pacing the hospital hallway, waiting for an update from Cannon's doctor and thinking of his own mother, an immigrant from Nicaragua who raised two boys on her own in the tough Pico-Union area.

She once hauled him to a liquor store in their neighborhood to view the bodies of two robbers shot dead. "Now, do you have any questions about what happens when you don't do the right thing?" she asked.

He didn't.

Still, it took his football coaches to keep him straight. "They took us out of the barrio, taught me I could be anything. ... I wouldn't have a life if it wasn't for them." Morales spent the morning at Ms. Belinda's bedside, talking and listening as she drifted in and out.

"She just wanted to know that she'd made a difference, that the boys are going to be all right," he said. "I told her, 'You're not walking alone. We'll take care of those boys.'"