The Thin Blue Line : Police Blame Explosion in Crime, Population for Drop in Service

Bob Burgreen recently visited the police Communications Division to watch dispatchers field calls for service. It was a Thursday afternoon, about 5:30, a quiet time, when workers are headed home and the biggest police emergency you would expect would be a traffic jam on Interstate 8.

The police chief asked the dispatchers to “bring up all of the available units”--in other words, to tell him exactly how many officers were free at that moment to handle emergencies.

With perhaps 120 units on duty on a typical weekday afternoon, Burgreen expected quite a few to be available to respond. To his dismay, the computer showed that the vast majority of them would have to be pulled from other calls to respond immediately.

When Burgreen looked at the screen, only four available units lit up.

Sharp Drop in Service

The level of service provided by the San Diego Police Department has dropped sharply over the past decade, police say.

It is the result of a dramatic change in the amount and kind of crime in San Diego, a city that has grown so fast that it now faces many of the same urban pathologies of other major cities in the United States. Although the number of officers in the department has increased with the explosive population growth of the city, each officer is responding to more calls than ever.

The problem has prompted top commanders to begin meeting to consider shifting more officers back onto the streets. Next month, the police, the city manager and the City Council are expected to open formal discussions on a proposed tax increase to pay for more street cops.

“We need more police officers in this city,” Burgreen said. “I am not satisfied with the kind of job we’re doing.”

He and other police experts from around the country agree that increasing the number of officers will not automatically reduce the crime rate or solve the problems of urban crime, whose roots may be in drugs and deeply embedded social ills.

Burgreen also maintains that there is no crisis in police manpower in San Diego. Homicides and other major crimes are still being investigated. Officers are almost always available to respond to top-priority emergencies.

But police say there has been a demonstrable decline in police service, and it can be seen in these key areas:

* Officers in the seven patrol divisions are spending well over half to two-thirds of their day responding to calls for service and writing reports. Police administrators in San Diego would like to see officers spend an even 50% of their day responding to calls, and the other half investigating crimes and performing prevention duties. That level of service has not been provided in San Diego in a dozen years, officials said.

* Response times have risen to the point where the average officer last year needed more than seven minutes to arrive at a high-priority emergency call--a situation where even a few seconds can mean the difference between life and death.

In some of the northern patrol areas, the response time hit well over eight minutes. A citywide, five-minute response time average is the eventual goal of the department, but that figure has not been met in 10 years.

* Each month, more than 1,000 reported crimes, particularly burglary and grand theft, which affect the most victims, are shelved because detectives simply do not have the time to work the cases.

That means countless police calls for home burglaries, car vandalism and other routine crimes are not being investigated. Instead, light-duty officers sitting at telephone banks are merely taking reports whose only real purpose is for insurance claims.

Police would like to see a 50% clearance rate on these crimes. But, as in the other categories, that expectation hasn’t been met in 10 years.

Waiting Outside Jail

Other major problems drain police manpower. Officers on all three shifts spend long periods lined up outside the crowded County Jail downtown, waiting to book prisoners. The false-alarm rate is continuing to rise, and officers are losing thousands of man-hours each year responding to bogus calls. And the ranks in the Police Reserve program, once a dependable source of backup help, are dwindling.

To many in the Police Department and on the City Council, the solution lies in hiring more officers and trying to saturate the streets by putting the new recruits out in the community.

But law enforcement experts outside San Diego caution that merely adding police won’t automatically reduce the crime rate.

“The way I see it, adding more police may in fact overload the criminal justice system and cause judges to let more people out faster,” said Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington-based, nonprofit organization that supports innovation and improvement in police work.

“That can happen if you think police are the end-all to reducing crime.”

Still, the manpower shortcomings can be felt on the streets of San Diego, where many of the laws that were being enforced 10 years ago are passed over by police today.

Patrol Sgt. Mark T. Dallezotte worries about prostitution on El Cajon Boulevard, but he can’t spare the men to help the undercover detectives in the vice unit.

“They tell us that they’ll do all the paper work on the arrests if we just transport the prostitutes to jail,” he said. “But I have to tell them no. I don’t have the manpower.”

Sgt. Jack Lilly sees signs that black and Latino gangs are warring over a new battleground downtown. Yet he recently had to turn loose 12 young Latino gang members after they were stopped at Horton Plaza and questioned about a rash of stabbings.

“There’s nothing we can do with them,” he said. “They’ll stay out into the wee hours, but what can we do? I guess we could enforce the curfew, but that would take too many officers out of service.”

And Officer Charles Belletti, like most of his colleagues, knows that whenever he drives out of the police station, the dispatcher will have a list of old calls waiting.

“I’ll tell you how shorthanded we are,” he said. “Go over to the dispatch center and look at the stack of unanswered calls. She’ll have two pages’ worth, and as soon as we report in-service, she’s asking us how many we can take.”

The rise in crime in San Diego over the past 10 years is startling.

There were 1.7 million calls for service last year, almost double the number a decade ago. Homicides have risen 112%. Aggravated assaults are up 238%, auto thefts 248%.

Those kinds of increases can be felt at all levels, even in the dispatchers’ room. Where 10 years ago emergency calls were answered within 2.4 seconds, the average citizen calling for help today will have to wait while the phone rings for 22 seconds.

To be sure, the number of police officers in San Diego has risen as well. There are 1,705 sworn officers, an increase of almost 600 from a decade ago. The police budget has gone from $35.2 million 10 years ago to $128 million today.

Under a plan approved by the City Council, the formula for obtaining new officers is tagged to the population. For the past several years, the department has been allowed to hire 1.62 officers for every 1,000 new city residents.

The council has talked about raising that level to 2.0 officers per 1,000, which would mean 440 new officers. Next month police administrators and City Manager John Lockwood will present to the council a detailed financial plan for a tax proposal to raise the money for more officers.

May Be Obsolete Already

But many police administrators are already concerned that the 2.0 figure is obsolete and that 2.5 is a more realistic goal if the department truly wants to return to its level of service 10 years ago.

City projections show that raising the level to 2.0 would cost $62 million. And to get to 2.5 officers, the cost would be about $130 million the first year and $110 million for each year after that, all on top of the department’s current operating expenses, Burgreen said.

“I don’t see that kind of money lying around,” he said.

Experts caution that voters may be fooling themselves if they think the answer to their problems is to raise taxes and hire more officers. Police response times may come down, and more officers may be freed to conduct crime-prevention duties, but a real decrease in the raw numbers of reported crimes would be unlikely.

Williams, of the Police Foundation, noted that New York added 5,000 officers some years ago, yet saw no reduction in the number of reported crimes. “Arrests increased significantly, but so did the crime rate,” he said.

He said police administrators should instead identify their specific problems, such as gangs and drugs, and then move large numbers of existing and new officers into those hot spots.

“It needs to be made emphatically clear to the public that the police are out there controlling the streets,” he said.

Malcolm Feeley of the Center for Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, said it may be unwise to predicate police staffing needs merely on the number of local residents.

“It’s not unreasonable to say we want to have a good number of officers per capita,” he said. “But I would urge the City Council to study other cities and see how they get by.”

San Diego is the seventh-largest city in the nation and ranks ninth in the number of officers per capita. Traditional high-crime cities have much higher ratios, with Detroit at 4.51 per 1,000 and New York at 3.91.

San Diego is the second-largest city in California, but ranks sixth in the number of officers per 1,000.

Critics of the Police Department’s management say part of the problem is that too many sworn officers have been taken out of uniform over the past 10 years and put into desk jobs. Cmdr. Cal Krosch declined to provide figures on the number of officers in uniform as opposed to handling administrative duties.

But, in an attempt to reverse the decline in service, Burgreen and the top members of his staff have been meeting recently to consider ways to move some desk officers out of their suits and ties and back into uniform.

Already, Burgreen has disbanded the 24-hour front-counter operation. Beyond that step, administrators don’t always agree on which other units should be sacrificed.

Deputy Chief Ken Fortier has suggested freeing up some officers by thinning out the Crime Stoppers, gun desk, public affairs, video-graphics, training, personnel and inspection and control units.

Krosch suggested eliminating the Horse Patrol instead. “If I had my way,” he said, “I’d do away with it.”

Yet the Horse Patrol is a favorite of the City Council, and, whenever council members discuss police priorities, they often speak in glowing terms about officers riding through Balboa Park.

Burgreen declined to say which units he favors scrapping or thinning, but he did say that major changes will be made within the next month. “We’re going through every position within the department,” he said.

50-50 Ratio Sought

One of the chief’s greatest concerns is that officers in each patrol division are spending well over 50% of their day simply responding to calls for service, and much less time on pro-active work--activities not in response to calls, including follow-up and crime-prevention duties.

In the high-crime areas, officers assigned to the Eastern Division spent 69% of their time in the last four months of 1988 “out of service,” which means handling calls or paper work and unavailable to respond, and in the Southeastern Division the ratio was 67%.

Officials would like to hit a 50-50 goal, which Fortier said was last reached about 1977.

Burgreen said the average officer responds to 10 to 15 calls during every 10-hour shift. “But you don’t solve outstanding crimes by running from radio call to radio call,” he said. “The only way you prevent crime is through pro-active police work.”

Feeley, of UC Berkeley, agreed. “It’s a terrific objective,” he said. “A lot of police work is being responsive to the community.”

San Diego police also would like to shave three minutes off their overall emergency response times, and begin arriving at crime scenes within an average of five minutes.

‘Couldn’t Do That Now’

Capt. Kenneth Moller of Field Operations recalled a time in the late 1950s when every type of call was answered promptly. “If an elderly man fell out of bed, and his wife called, we went by and helped him back up,” Moller said. “But we couldn’t do that now. We don’t have the time.”

In some cases, police aren’t even coming close. Denise Lavell, a member of the Civilian Advisory Panel on Police Practices, has ridden with officers in every section of the city. She said that overworked officers routinely arrive late to some medium-priority calls.

“I have literally been in the car when there have been calls that were half an hour old,” she said. “Even 40 minutes old.”

With each officer handling more crimes, more follow-up investigations are being shelved. Robbery and burglarly detectives are inundated with cases.

Police statistics show there were 974 residential robberies in September, 67% of which were shelved or received little investigative attention. There were 375 commercial burglaries, 53% of which were shelved, and 533 cases of grand theft, 74% of which were shelved.

“It used to be a detective came out when your car was vandalized,” said Lt. Lou Scanlon, who heads the investigations in the Southeastern station. “That never happens anymore.”

Too Many False Alarms

Police are concerned about other issues affecting manpower as well.

During the first 11 months of 1988, there were nearly 27,000 false-alarm dispatches. The average time required for each alarm call is 26 minutes, which means 11,557 man-hours were lost.

Burgreen said he plans to present several recommendations to the city manager within the next couple of months, including not responding to burglar alarms unless a private security guard has first determined that a crime occurred, and levying a user fee on alarm owners.

Meanwhile, reserve officer strength is dwindling, mostly because new training requirements have turned off many would-be volunteers. Sgt. Charles Woodruff said there are only 114 active police reserves today, down from about 300 in the mid-1970s.

Burgreen, although conceding that the reserves have been a source of support in the past, said he is reconsidering whether the program is still worthwhile, especially since police work today “has become a very, very specialized field.”

With more calls coming in every day, dispatchers are sending more crime victims to the Telephone Report Unit. That means victims give information to light-duty officers over the phone, and seldom see any follow-up investigation. Last year, more than 40,000 reports were taken by phone. Police say that’s a far cry from the old days, when officers tried to answer all types of calls.

“Right now, if somebody steals your garden hose, you’re going to call and talk to an officer who will make a report,” Burgreen said. “But you’ll never see an officer. And that’s a deterioration in the level of service.”

OFFICERS PER 1,000 POPULATION

10 most populous California cities. SAN FRANCISCO: 2.66 LOS ANGELES: 2.43 SACRAMENTO: 1.70 LONG BEACH: 1.69 OAKLAND: 1.66 SAN DIEGO: 1.62 SANTA ANA: 1.48 SAN JOSE: 1.39 FRESNO: 1.35 ANAHEIM: 1.30

SOURCE: San Diego City Manager’s Office

OFFICERS PER 1,000 POPULATION

10 most populous U.S. cities. DETROIT: 4.51 PHILADELPHIA: 4.21 CHICAGO: 4.03 NEW YORK: 3.91 LOS ANGELES: 2.43 HOUSTON: 2.43 DALLAS: 2.43 PHOENIX: 1.99 SAN DIEGO: 1.62 SAN ANTONIO: 1.60

SOURCE: San Diego City Manager’s Office