Officers Want More Staffing, Equipment : Police in National City Begin Work Slowdown

The National City Police Officers Assn.--which says it’s frustrated over inadequate staffing and dangerous equipment--began a work slowdown Friday night that includes responding to fewer calls for help.

But National City Mayor George Waters, in a return salvo, declared that individual officers “will be held responsible for anything they do that hurts the community.” He would not rule out firings as a last resort.

Relations between the city and its approximately 60-member police force have been severely troubled in recent months over futile contract negotiations, especially since the March firing of controversial Police Chief Terry Hart. On July 4, after an impasse in the talks, two shifts called in sick.

The City Council this week approved a 9.5% pay raise for the police in a new contract, but association President Mark Musgrove said the contract failed to address the need for additional staffing and equipment, including Mace and sanitary face masks for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Low-Priority Calls

“Officers will insist on adequate (help) being present prior to committing themselves to dangerous and hazardous calls,” said association lawyer Everett Bobbitt, in describing the series of job actions that began Friday night. Traffic citations and routine calls will have a very low priority, and officers will be pulled from their beats to double up on crimes in progress, he said.

Bobbitt said the state Labor Code provides that workers can refuse to participate in unsafe conditions that could reasonably be corrected by the employer, and said officers will exercise that right in implementing the slowdown.

Several officers have been injured in the past few months, and Bobbitt and Musgrove said at least two of the incidents were caused by 15-hour work days that exhausted the officers involved. They claimed that as many as six top-priority calls per day have already been going unanswered because of insufficient manpower.

The mayor flatly contradicted many of the association’s points, saying that the equipment--from tires to more ammunition--was on order and calling equipment-related safety concerns “a phony issue.” The contention that the department has been unwilling to get new materials “is just 100% not true,” Waters said.

‘Not Stable With News Media’

“The equipment has already been authorized,” he said. “They’re jumping from one thing to another. First it was salaries, then it was equipment. They are not being stable with the news media, and it just seems like a pattern.”

“They think they’re running the department,” Waters said.

He also blamed the injuries on poor training and ignored procedures, not overwork. “We have 10 officers that have been hurt. That means that they haven’t been trained properly. The senior officers spend a lot of time talking, and they should be spending more time training,” he said.

Acting Police Chief Wayne Fowler could not be reached for comment, and Capt. Thomas Deese did not return phone calls.

Waters said the $7-million Police Department budget has doubled since 1981.

“A rookie cop gets paid, in salary and benefits, $57,687 (annually). Why get more police officers until you get the existing officers trained?” said Waters, noting that the city has paid out more than $100,000 in police brutality and harassment lawsuit settlements. “That takes revenue too,” he said.

Among the services likely to suffer most, according to association president Musgrove, are “officer-initiated arrests,” such as narcotics and weapons charges stemming from investigations conducted between emergency calls.

“I don’t know what effect it will have on crime, but we certainly don’t expect it to decrease. Police officers work as hard in this office as in any agency in the county, and cops are going to be a priority for themselves,” Musgrove said.