Suffering
from a deficit of hundreds of officers and flooded
with low-priority calls for incidents such as
barking dogs and disobedient children, police are
struggling to arrive at scenes in a timely manner.
To avoid
such gridlock, Police Chief William McManus and city
officials have proposed reconfiguring how officers
respond to certain calls. Currently, anyone who
calls 911 seeking an officer will get one —
eventually. That would change under the new plan,
called SMART, or Strategic Management for
Accelerated Response Times. McManus Wednesday
morning briefed the city council's Public Safety
Committee, on which four council members sit. The
measure is expected to be brought before the full
11-member council next week.
The initiative “is meant to increase our
efficiency by eliminating calls that don’t
necessarily require a police response or could be
handled in a different way,” McManus said in an
interview. “The goal is to get (to scenes) as
quickly as we can. The goal is to free officers up
as much as we can, so they can handle calls as
expediently as they can, so (a call) is not sitting
in the queue.”
The details are in flux, but here’s the
foundation:
Dispatchers would reroute certain 911 calls away
from police, eliminating any officer response.
McManus said police would no longer respond to calls
where there’s “no breach of the peace and/or no
criminal intent is present,” determinations that
would be made by dispatchers. Under the new program,
officers will no longer respond to certain calls,
including animal calls that don't pose a threat to
public safety and someone swimming in a community
pool after hours.
While an officer will no longer make those
scenes, residents who report such information will
be routed to the proper city department to address
the problem.
The initiative also calls for the implementation
of a Web-based reporting system in which residents
can file their own police reports online for certain
crimes, such as graffiti, vehicle burglaries and gas
drive-offs.
McManus said officers could use their own
discretion in deciding when to expedite a call,
although such calls must be more than 30 minutes old
and cannot encompass any risk of personal injury or
property damage. Examples include lost property and
burglaries of coin-operated machines.
The chief's plans have been met with skepticism
by some of the Police Department’s officers, who
caution that seemingly innocuous calls can escalate
into violence. But McManus, along with Councilmen
John Clamp and Justin Rodriguez, both of whom helped
form the initiative, said the new policies would not
erode public safety.
“If there’s a crime in process, we’re going,”
McManus stressed.
Rodriguez said city officials would recommend
funding 100 new officer positions for the upcoming
budget. Yet the dearth of cops requires creative
measures.
“We’re making serious strides (in hiring more
officers), but it’s still a deficit,” he said. “This
is another way to make sure there’s an active police
presence in our communities.”
In the past six years, average response times for
non-emergency calls have increased nearly 30
percent, from 15.35 minutes to nearly 20 minutes,
according to Police Department data.
Average response times for emergency calls have
increased about eight percent in the same timeframe.
“It does need to be improved,” McManus said. “If
I could drop 500 officers in the department, then
you’d see an immediate change.”
He added that the volume of 911 calls has been
increasing “about 3 percent” every year. Last year,
officers responded to more than 1 million calls.
“That shows a need for a differential response,”
McManus said.
Thomas Aveni, co-founder of the Police Policy
Studies Council in Spofford, N.H., called the SMART
initiative “cutting-edge” and recourse for
constraints afflicting cops across the nation.
“Agencies are looking for ways to unshackle
officers from low-priority calls completely,” Aveni
said. “The changes that Chief McManus are
implementing are ahead of the curve. I think he’s
one of the first major police department chiefs to
implement this type of program.”