Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

Regina Brett this morning:

Crime statistics don’t give whole story…

So I called the police. How many more cops do we need to make this town safe?

The answer surprised me. Cleveland Police Department spokesman Lt. Thomas Stacho didn’t give me a number. He wants more officers, but said he wasn’t sure how many we needed since crime is down from last year.

What?

Violent crime is down 15 percent, according to FBI statistics:

Rapes are down 24.5 percent.

Felony thefts are down 23.9 percent.

Burglaries are down 15 percent.

Aggravated assaults are down 4.4 percent.

Murders are up slightly. So far, Cleveland has had 91 homicides this year, up from 86 at this time last year. That’s not a huge leap. But the media - myself included - keep spotlighting them.

“Perception is not reality,” Lt. Stacho said. “It gives the impression we live in a lawless city. The numbers tell a different story.”

Actually, you can look at it two ways: Either the media are sensationalizing the crimes this year or the media are doing a better job of covering them this year.

Or, here’s a third way: All media hype aside, Cleveland residents are reacting to a longer-term trend than just one year.

Using the U.S. Census’ least dramatic version of the city’s population loss — from the Annual Population Estimate — and the crime statistics available at NEOCANDO, here are the annual numbers of reported homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and rapes per 100,000 Cleveland residents since 1990 (1998 not available):

Looking at these trend lines, it’s very hard to avoid the inference that having hundreds fewer police since the 2004 layoffs has contributed to more street violence. Okay, all we really know is that the two things coincided… but that still makes Lieutenant Stacho’s spin a lot less persuasive. (Property crimes per 100,000 residents also rose between 2003 and 2006, but less dramatically.)

So the CPPA president’s answer is a quarter-percent income tax hike to raise $31 million to hire back 300 police officers. (Ummm… pardon my arithmetic, but that seems to imply a cost of $100,000+ per officer. Is that correct?) Brett lists all the things police used to do and could do again if there were more of them — ministations, gang unit, horse cops, bike cops, etc. Oh yeah, and cameras.

I actually called for the same thing in this blog back at the time of the layoffs, so I’m not “cringing” at the idea of a small, dedicated public safety tax hike. In fact, I’m beginning to think that the PD and the TV stations — combined with real public fear and anger — may have created the rare opportunity for Frank Jackson to try something this unlikely and pull it off.

But would I actually vote to give the City another couple of hundred dollars a year, just to hire back more cops?

No. Not unless I felt I was buying a real Plan. And if Brett’s wish list proves anything, it proves that no such Plan is on the table.

300 more very expensive police officers riding around in cars — or on horses, or bicycles — is not a Plan. It’s a starting point, perhaps. But I was here when we had bike patrols and mounted cops and those extra zone cars, and I worked personally with the ministation officers and the Second District vice and gang units. Let me tell you from experience: These are tools, not strategies. They can be effective tools or mammoth wastes of money.

The difference lies, as you would expect, in whether the police have clear objectives, a coherent plan to reach those objectives, the alliances they need with other community actors, and the genuine commitment of all personnel to work with those allies to implement the plan. In my experience, none of these things can be assumed to exist at any level — not at the Department, or the District, or the special unit or the ministation or the zone car.

So before I consider voting for a public safety tax, I want to see The Plan — for the whole city, and for my neighborhood. I want to see the Mayor, the Safety Director, the Police Chief, the Second District Commander, the Councilman, and the CPPA signed up for The Plan and able to explain it to me. I want to see the budget. I want to see the timeline. I want to see the evaluation benchmarks. I want to know who else has to help, and see evidence of their commitment, and see their role in the budget if that’s called for.

And I’d want to see at least two other things:

• a technology plan that includes a fully deployed broadband public safety network, and
• significant resources to support competent community safety organizing by civilians (not $100,000 police officers) throughout the city.

Does this all seem a little demanding? Well, the city will spend a third of its general fund and two-thirds of its income tax collections — over $175 million — on uniformed police services this year. That’s about a thousand dollars per household. The CPPA proposal would increase this expenditure by 17-18%… another $150-200 per household.

So I think it’s fair to ask exactly what they’d do with the money to change those trend lines.

“More cops in more places” just doesn’t ring the bell for me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 7:58 am and is filed under Neighborhood, Poor Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.