So, 600 people on the Westside want more police services. Maybe. I’m not sure what they want. The angry emails I have been getting say they want a loitering ordinance and a chronic nuisance (it’s been drafted for over a year and we’ve had council discussions on this, but the sponsor is still working on it) ordinance and they don’t want trolleys and swimming pools. Interesting. I wonder what they know about these two ordinances and what they think they will do and how they seized on these two “tools” to solve their problems.
The TV news reported they just wanted more police. That’s something I understand a bit better. Last year at budget time, I sponsored the following amendment so that we could look at how police are using their resources and try to focus their efforts on neighborhood concerns. This is from my four part blog (1, 2, 3, 4) at budget time last year:
Amendment #13 – The original amendment would have made the 10 new police officers neighborhood officers. After asking the police chief some questions about previous police staffing committees and the plan for how they were spending the $50,000 for a staffing study, I offered the following substitute:
A police staffing subcommittee shall be established by the Common Council to review the police staffing report funded in the 2007 budget, if completed, and shall make recommendations to the Common Council and Police Chief which shall include, but not be limited to recommendations regarding the number of neighborhood officers, the staffing levels for Community Policing Teams and other community policing initiatives. This committee shall report back to the Common Council by October 1, 2007.
There were several amendments and friendly amendments to this and we voted on if the language should just say:
A committee shall be established by the Common Council to provide input in the creation of a the police staffing report funded in the 2007 budget.
That motion failed on a voice vote.
Then we went back to the substitute language above. At issue was whether the Council gets input into major policing philosophy changes or if we just hire the police cheif and let him make the decisions. I was hoping we could have a community discussion about what community policing means to us. However, that motion failed. Votes were as follows:
Yes – Webber, Benford, King, Konkel, Olson, Sanborn, Skidmore, Verveer
No – Brandon, Bruer, Cnare, Compton, Gruber, Knox, Palm, Radomski, Rosas, Thomas, VanRooy
Present: Golden (this essentially means they don’t cast a vote in favor or against)
I find that interesting in that several of the emails accused us of not supporting their alder’s efforts. Well, if their alder is Thuy Pham–Remmele, she hasn’t proposed anything. In fact, I think the only thing she did was send out that crazy press release. If they’re talking about Cindy Thomas, I’d say she didn’t support the budget amendment above that their neighborhood seems to want and need.
As for me, what I really want, is some damn communication. This isn’t a new issue, we’ve been through this before. I swear, they police have mastered the press release and the media and are very savvy users of the media, but they can’t seem to give us alders the information we need. I’ve had two sexual assaults (1, 2)that affect my district in the last three weeks where I got the press release or information from the newspaper or from neighborhood listserves before the police contacted me on them. In fact, the police didn’t contact me. I had to contact them to find out what is going on and didn’t hear back until days later. This, despite the fact that we’ve had this discussion with them and they promised to do better.
There’s no doubt, we need to take a serious look at what the police are, or are not, doing in this City. We need to see the results of that police staffing study. As the largest budget in the City ($50M), one has to believe that there is room for efficiencies and improved management. Tho, as I’ve stated before, we won’t know until we get more information about how that money is spent. This ought to be an interesting budget season. I’m afraid, instead of making good budgeting decisions, we’ll be making political ones that are based on fear.
