Chief Vows to Bolster Foot Patrols : Police: Bob Burgreen announces plan to review departments and cull up to 100 officers for assignments to the city’s neighborhoods.

San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen, saying he was “tired of not having enough people on the street and tired of not doing neighborhood patrols well,” called Friday for a sweeping inspection of the department to identify up to 100 officers he can add to patrol duty.

By the end of summer, Burgreen wants to complete an examination into every unit to determine who is expendable to strengthen foot patrols, neighborhood policing and narcotics enforcement.

Many of those he wants back into patrol will be assigned to “neighborhood policing” assignments, which emphasizes the need for officers to find the causes of problems before they become larger. It is hoped that the strategy will further reduce crime, Burgreen said.

The reassignments will be permanent unless more city money becomes available in future years.

“Nobody is off-limits except homicide and child abuse,” Burgreen said. “I want 70 to 100 more cops from what I have right now. And we’ll go through a unit at a time, taking into account workload and arrest factors and how everything lines up with our priorities.”

Burgreen’s plan to cull officers from different areas comes at a time when he is getting limited resources from City Council. This year, council approved 25 new officers but authorized none last year.

The department has 1,821 sworn officers. Of those, 741 are patrol officers, required to respond to calls for service in the city. Another 216 help out on calls and are part of the department’s “uniformed patrol,” but have special assignments, such as a gang unit, a canine division or traffic patrol.

Department statistics show that from January, 1987, to November, 1990, patrol staffing increased 9%, while calls for service increased 30%.

At the same time, there has been an 11% increase in the time that patrol cars are “out of service,” taking crime reports, making arrests or doing anything else that keeps them from answering other calls.

The department projected that, with two smaller-than-expected police academy classes graduating and the loss of an average of eight officers per month to attrition, the agency would be down to 725 patrol officers in August.

Police administrators have already taken steps to cut the number of calls patrol officers must respond to, such as distributing accident forms to those at the scene of non-injury accidents. They briefly adopted--and then abandoned because of legal problems--the practice of allowing security guards at department stores to write shoplifting citations.

One patrol division has asked officers who respond to homes where faulty burglar alarms are set off to leave notes asking that the alarms be fixed so the problem won’t occur again.

Officials are also considering whether to take auto theft reports over the telephone rather than in person. The city had about 40,000 auto thefts last year.

San Diego police try to keep 80% to 85% of each patrol division in the city answering calls, but, on some days, the divisions are only 75%-to-80% strong, Cmdr. Jerry Sanders, head of field operations for the department, said.

“One of our primary purposes is to answer the calls from the public,” he said. “So we need to go out and take a look at what we have. Maybe we’ll lighten up on some detectives until the academies are back up to speed. We’ll move people to where the greatest need is.”

Burgreen has shuffled manpower before. In February, during the Persian Gulf war, he temporarily placed about 30 detectives and support officers back into uniform because so much of his force was devoted to keeping the peace at war protests.

But carving out a group of 70 to 100 officers for patrol is much more ambitious, Burgreen acknowledges, and will take a careful analysis and much debate.

“None of this has been tested, and we have not made any of the hard decisions,” he said. “I have no preconceived notion of where we will cut because I want to look at everything.”