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Community policing scrapped

By ABHI RAGHUNATHAN
Published December 16, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Police Chief Chuck Harmon is ending the city's 15-year-old community policing program and transferring its 41 officers to other jobs in the department.

The move, which received a mixed response from neighborhood leaders and was criticized by the police union, comes as the department struggles to retain officers and faces an outside review of its management practices.

To replace the community police officers, the department is creating three "community service lines" that residents can call to report issues. Patrol officers will do more community policing, and Harmon is expanding the department's street crimes force and adding a cyberdetective.

The 41 community officers - less than 10 percent of the department's staff of about 500 officers - are assigned to specific neighborhoods. They get to know residents, attend neighborhood association meetings and keep track of suspicious characters. In many ways, they are liaisons between neighborhoods and the Police Department.

But Harmon said tensions exist between community officers and patrol officers, who feel overworked and think community officers had too much freedom. The chief also said he was frustrated by complaints that community officers didn't return phone calls promptly or attend neighborhood meetings.

The solution, Harmon said: Make community policing something all patrol officers do, a strategy that some other law enforcement agencies have adopted. The changes are effective Monday.

"To me, this is an obvious expansion," Harmon said. "Everybody in the department's going to be responding to neighborhood issues."

Residents who call the new service lines would hear back from an officer within 24 hours, Harmon said.

Fred Shenkman, an emeritus professor of criminology at the University of Florida, said many other departments have entrusted all officers with community policing responsibilities rather than creating special groups. But, Shenkman said, such efforts produced little genuine community policing. "To take police officers, put them through seminars and then say, 'You'll be different,' doesn't work," he said.

Mark Deasaro, a community police officer and president of the Police Benevolent Association of Pinellas County, criticized the move.

"It's going to be horrible," Deasaro said. "You've taken away the average citizen's link to the Police Department."

Mayor Rick Baker said Friday he supported Harmon's decision. "The system we're putting in place is more common than the one we had," Baker said.

But some of the biggest breaks in high-profile criminal cases this year came through the efforts of community police officers who knew their neighborhoods.

Police were able to arrest the man accused of raping a 8-year-old girl in Central Oak Park largely because community police Officer Kenny Miller was quickly able to match the description of the suspect to a character in the neighborhood. Residents in Palmetto Park, where suspected drug dealers are accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of crime watch members, praised the work of community police Officer Patrick McGovern.

Karl Nurse, the president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations, blasted the decision to move away from such officers.

"This is just a huge, huge mistake," Nurse said. "Community policing is the only time you ever get people to know a neighborhood well enough to know the good guys and the bad guys."

But other neighborhood leaders praised Harmon's move. Cheryl Greenwood, president of the Northeast Park Neighborhood Association, said she was optimistic about the plan.

"It's a win-win situation," she said. "The biggest thing that's going to upset people is that we do all have relationships with our community police officers."

City Council member Bill Foster said it was too early to tell if Harmon's decision was the right one.

"People are going to have to give it a chance," he said. "It's going to take time and patience to see how this restructuring plays out."

Times staff writer Aaron Sharockman contributed to this report. Abhi Raghunathan can be reached at araghunathan@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8472.

[Last modified December 16, 2006, 01:00:55]