Plans for Increased Police Presence Are Missing Big Picture : Courts, jails, crime prevention--and the tab--need to be figured into equation

Pressure to put more cops on San Diego streets is growing--from politicians, the police and the public. It’s not surprising. Violent crime soared last year locally, and those vying for the mayor’s job this year recognize a hot political issue when they see it.

Polls, including a recent one by The Times, show that crime is higher on San Diegans’ list of important problems than it is nationally or statewide.

The Times Poll also found some indication that the public might be willing to pay for law enforcement. A whopping 72% of San Diego city residents said they would be inclined to support a new tax devoted to increasing the police force. And 64% of residents countywide said they would be inclined to support a tax for jails.

There is no shortage of ideas for adding cops. But there is a dearth of good ideas.

The San Diego Police Officers Assn. is trying for a ballot measure to require a 50% increase in the ratio of police to the city’s population by 1999, and the proposal has the support of mayoral hopeful Councilman Ron Roberts and two other council members.

Another expected mayoral candidate, Peter Navarro, and his slow-growth organization, Prevent Los Angelization Now!, have proposed a ballot measure that would require the city to assure that new development does not decrease police presence or response times.

Both ballot proposals are shortsighted.

The POA proposal is the most troubling. It contains no provision for paying the estimated $110 million that adding more than 1,400 officers would cost over seven years, not to mention the annual costs after 1999.

Already, about 35% of the city’s general fund operating budget is devoted to police. The increase proposed by the POA would necessarily strip resources from other services such as libraries, park maintenance and recreation programs, planning and fire protection, unless voters approved a separate tax increase.

The measure also fails to take into account the impact the extra officers would have on courts, jails and the district attorney’s office. The City Council should not put this measure on the ballot. And we hope the POA will reconsider the wisdom of its approach before circulating petitions.

The PLAN measure also raises questions, although it is less drastic than the POA proposal because it doesn’t require an increase in police protection. It would require that new development not reduce police protection. It would leave the implementation up to the City Council, making it better than many initiatives.

But the PLAN measure raises, to a much lesser extent, the same concern as the POA proposal. It does not provide for a way to pay for the minimum police protection it would mandate. State law says that development fees can only be used for facilities, not for services. So, if the taxes generated by a development would not pay for the needed police protection, the money presumably would have to come from other services or the project could not be approved.

This could be particularly damaging during a recession, when tax revenues are down and the development industry is already hard hit.

While these proposals are being debated, the county is trying to figure out how it’s going to build additional jails or operate the ones it has, now that the state Supreme Court has overturned the jail tax.

And the city and county are engaged in counterproductive finger-pointing about who is doing what to ease the crunch on jail and court space and what impact the city’s new jail and its plan to reassign more police officers to street duty will have on other parts of the criminal justice system.

None of this debate takes into account crime prevention--except that which can be accomplished by additional law enforcement--or drug abuse, which produces so much crime.

What’s needed is regional cooperation on these important law enforcement needs. Not political grandstanding. Not finger-pointing. Not piecemeal solutions that create as many problems as they solve.

It’s time that leaders in the cities and the county work together on law enforcement rather than use crime for political gain.

What’s needed is a comprehensive--but reasonable--approach to law enforcement that covers cops, courts, jails, probation, crime prevention and drug abuse treatment, and a way to pay for it.

It would take leadership to develop and sell such a plan, which may be too much to ask in an election year, when leadership takes a back seat to politics.

But such a plan could put more cops on the street and give them the tools they need to do the job the citizens want them to do, protect the public safety. And that’s something the public might even be willing to pay for.