Mayor Greg Nickels and Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske are trying to drum up support for a new concept in the way crime is handled in Seattle. Called "Neighborhood Policing," it is a "faster, stronger and smarter" approach to public safety, according to the mayor.
There are three elements to the proposal, and each faces its own challenges. The primary goal is to add an additional 105 officers to the force between 2008 and 2012. That's in addition to the 49 new cops added to the force since 2005, Nickels said.
However, Seattle City Council member Richard McIver said, paying for the new cops will involve cuts in other programs since hope of getting $21 million in business-and-occupation (B & O) taxes from the state is dead in the water for this session.
Furthermore, finding new police in the first place won't be easy because it's a recruits' market, according to Seattle Police Officers Guild president Rich O'Neil.
The second element involves revising police work shifts to make officers available at the times and days they are most needed. The current 30-year-old arrangement sees officers work four, nine-hour shifts on and two shifts off, but changing that will require negotiations with and agreement from the police guild, O'Neil noted.
The idea is to have more cops on duty when there's more crime, said Doug Carey, the city's assistant finance director and the lead in the department's public-safety team.
The third part of the proposal is a call to redraw beat areas, something that hasn't been done since the 1970s. Historically, one cop has been assigned to each beat for each of three daily shifts, Carey said.
Still, neighborhoods will end up with fewer beats, according to a workload-based police map that reduces the current number of 64 beats to 51.
The East Precinct, which includes all of Capitol Hill, would see a reduction of 14 beats to nine. The North Precinct would see a reduction from 18 beats to 15; the West Precinct would see a reduction from 14 beats to 12; the South Precinct would see a reduction from 10 beats to nine; and the Southwest Precinct would see eight beats cut to six, according to the map.
The most noticeable change is in the West Precinct which will be expanded to the east side of Lake Union.
Kerlikowske describes the current workload as "very imbalanced" and one in which cops are often pulled from non-busy areas to busy areas. "As the city grew, things got out of whack as far as workload," he said.
Another key change is boosting response times for police, Kerlikowske added. The "average" response time over a 24-hour time period is seven minutes, but the goal of the new plan, plus hiring more officers, is to make the seven-minute response time uniform all day and all night, he said.
Another goal of neighborhood policing is to free up officers enough that they can spend 30 percent of their time doing proactive crime-prevention work in the neighborhoods they cover. But that, and other proposed changes, won't be possible without the extra 105 officers, according to Ker-likowske.
Nickels thinks the city can pull it off. The loss of the B&O tax was a blow, he conceded. "It was essentially a break for big business," the mayor said. "But this plan is not contingent on that (tax money)."
McIver, who chairs the city council's Finance and Budget Committee, agrees - at least to a certain extent. "My guess is, we'll work hard to get the money," he said. "But somebody's going to get hurt." That might include cuts to the library budget, for example, McIver said of one example.
The local economy has seen pretty steady economic growth in the past couple of years, but the growth has leveled off, he added. Complicating the city's money crunch is the possible loss of $5 million to $8 million if the Federal Communications Commission decides to keep the utility tax people pay with their phone bills, McIver added.
The city doesn't have a budget surplus right now, which ironically makes budget decisions easier because expectations aren't high, he said. On the flip side, the budget for 2008 has already been finalized and won't be revisited by the council until next fall, McIver noted.
The budget is also something picked up on by police guild president O'Neil. "If he had done it a couple months ago, he could have put it in the (2008) budget," he said of Nickel's new policing-plan proposal.
But O'Neil agrees wholeheartedly that more cops are needed in Seattle. "It doesn't make much sense to me to have $1 million condos downtown if the owners have step over drunks to get to their front doors," he said of one example.
O'Neil also noted that Seattle ranks extremely low in police per capita. Boston, which has roughly the same population as Seattle, has 1,900 officers on the force, he said.
Kerlikowske said one selling point for new police recruits is the quality of life in Seattle, but O'Neil noted almost all Seattle police officers live outside the city because they can't afford to live here. "We have officers living as far away as Bellingham."
Compensation also lags behind other cities, according to O'Neil. "Everybody else kicks our tail as far as benefits and pay," is how he put it.
If the neighborhood-policing plan makes the city safer, guild members are all for it, O'Neil said. He did, however, add a caveat: "We're trying to get a fair transition."
Community meetings have been scheduled to talk about the proposal. One on Capitol Hill has already taken place. But another is scheduled for April 25 at 6 p.m. at the ARC building in Woodland Park Zoo at 5500 Phinney Ave. N.
Russ Zabel is a reporter for Pacific Publishing Inc. He can be reached at editor@capitolhill times.com.
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