Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

A rethink on neighborhood police

How effective St. Petersburg's community policing program has been in reducing crime is difficult to measure, but it has been popular among neighborhood groups for years. So police Chief Chuck Harmon has his work cut out for him as he disbands the unit and moves to integrate the community concepts throughout the force. He will need to convince residents that his department is still listening and that his officers are still intimately familiar with the pulse of the neighborhoods.

The chief is making two immediate changes in that regard, assigning a community service sergeant and four service officers to each of the city's three policing districts. They will make sure that officers attend neighborhood association meetings and answer all nonemergency calls about neighborhood concerns within 24 hours. Those are benchmarks that easily can be measured.

The larger transformation won't be quite as simple, given most police officers' traditional training and experience in catching criminals. But folding the current 41 community officers into the patrol division should provide flexibility for all officers to, on occasion, follow up neighborhood concerns they discover on the beat. St. Petersburg residents have come to expect a particular level of service from community police officers who do their job well.

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

That sounds good, but the danger is that neighborhood issues could take a back seat to the emergencies that necessarily define a police department's priorities. Harmon is right that the lines can blur. For example, his redeployment will add a sergeant and eight officers to the visible and highly successful Street Crimes Unit. That unit's work invariably ties into neighborhood concerns about drug sales and prostitution.

At times, community police officers already were being pulled away from their usual work to focus on those types of crimes. That fueled concerns that the department has been understaffed, an argument underscored by statistics that have shown St. Petersburg has one of the lowest ratios of officers to citizens among large Florida cities. While Harmon says the department is adequately staffed, he can expect to face questions about whether his new approach to community policing is an attempt to spread the workload among more officers and avoid seeking more money to expand the department.

Some neighborhood activists and the police union president already have criticized the change. Mark Deasaro, a community police officer and president of the Police Benevolent Association of Pinellas County, told a reporter: "It's going to be horrible. You've taken away the average citizen's link to the Police Department."

The concerns are understandable, but Harmon has never been the strongest advocate for community policing in the way it has been done in St. Petersburg. It should come as no surprise that he finally decided to scrap the system he inherited, and after five years as chief he has every right to put his imprint on policing policy. He says the old community policing model fragmented the department in ways that created internal conflict as well as some public confusion, and it is clear that in some neighborhoods it did not work nearly as well as intended.

Harmon is planning a "community retreat" in March to solicit feedback on how the new plan is working, but for now he asks residents to "keep an open mind." St. Petersburg residents do need to give the plan a chance, and the chief needs to keep listening and make good on his pledge to make this new system embody the goals of community policing on a broader scale. Many residents agree with Deasaro that the community officers were their link to police. A broader community policing concept can't underestimate the importance of that link or result in a decline in service.

[Last modified December 19, 2006, 00:20:37]