by Jack Lee
As you know only too well, this is the year of cutbacks, lay offs and unfilled positions in laws enforcement. In some areas like Sacramento the cuts are so deep that departments will no longer respond to investigated a home burglary that is NOT in progress. The homeowner will be sent a property loss report to fill out instead of police contact.
Local law enforcement is no exception, they are facing some manpower shortages in order to balance their budget. What it means is either make a knee-jerk cut in services or think outside the box and re-evaluate the departments priorities and come up with a real good plan!
It is possible to do more with less, even when you think you are short on officers and money. I know because I’m speaking from personal experience when I worked in law enforcement. I always had to do more with less. This was just a constant operating environment, not just something that happened in a recession.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let’s say police department X has a traffic detail that typically uses several motor officers in conjunction with other patrol type vehicles to work strictly traffic enforcement. When part of your traffic unit is funded by a traffic grant you absolutely have to dedicate those rescources to traffic control, ah, but where you do traffic control is up to you! By taking motor officers into a high property crime area their visibility has an impact on criminal activity… as well as traffic flow. It’s now a two for one gain now, less crime and less speeders! Maybe our local police department is doing this already, I don’t know, I’m just giving you an example of how innovation works to make up for manpower shortages.
Sometimes, a small police department can shift almost all their available resources into an area for saturated enforcement, if only for a short period. This makes the necessary short term impact. And by doing this, history shows us [Part One] crimes (.i.e. robbery, assaults, rape, etc.) dramatically drop.
Remember, the majority of crimes are committed by just a small minority of people. You take just one of these [key] criminals out of action and you’ve stopped a whole host of crimes… it’s that simple, but how to do it and do it with limited personnel, well, that’s the challenge isn’t it?
by Jack Lee
CONT- When times get tough as they are now, it’s up to the local authorities, the Chief of Police or the County Sheriff to come up with some new ideas and fast to hold the line against crime! Crime is ready to run wild whenever the opportunity exists and in a recession guess what…crime goes up. Usually the new ideas means starting with a meeting of his/her supervisors and together they go over their whole routine of policing… from top to bottom.
They re-evaluate their operation based on the available resources and the most desperate needs. Then they come out with a plan to re-deploy personnel with new tactics, well defined goals that may include hot targets and high priorities.
This plan must involve reaching out to public at many levels because this will eventually become fundamental to the operations success. Citizen involvement and support is a make or break situation and I can’t stress that enough.
If the long range plan is done right, it’s possible to turn around crime ridden neighborhoods in a matter of weeks, if not days, by having a solid pro-active plan of action and I’ll explain more on that in just a moment. This plan doesn’t require a team of detectives or specialized uniformed officers either and that’s the beauty of it. Just one determined, innovative cop working with a few dozen people in a neighborhood can make a difference, a whole shift of officers working smart makes a big difference and it makes headlines, which also helps the mission and PR! And every successful plan ever conceived involves being pro-active.
What’s “proactive” mean exactly? It means not waiting for the crime to happen, but interdicting it! Here’s one idea, how about using the city code enforcement officer to help identify abandoned properties and get them cleaned up? We know those kind of houses lead to blight and then crime. It’s not the traditional way law enforcement works, but it’s helpful. Officers involved in teen programs helps too, such as the Boys and Girls Club or just making friends with kids where they live…it all helps. It’s simple, it’s inexpensive and it works.
Another is, albeit more into the re-active area is the Dept. of Justice. They have a property section with all kinds of crime fighting goodies to loan. They have night vision devices, surveillance cameras and a variety of silent alarm systems and more, and its all available to police departments and its all free of charge for a loan up to a month or more. These items can be used to help stake out a problem area and catch criminals in the act! But, few departments take advantage of this program.
Proactive also means contacting the people in problem areas and asking for their help. They know where the problems are and where the problem people hang out…they know who’s dealing drugs, who’s buying stolen property or who’s into gang activity, but cops have to leave that patrol car and get out there! They have to talk face to face with all sorts of folks from the homeless to home owners.
Some of my best sources were some pretty seedy people. Once, I had one drug dealer tell me about another drug dealer ( a competitor) and eventually they both went down. Hey, whatever it takes…! This is what I mean by being proactive, you’re not waiting to respond to the crime after the fact…that is the band-aid approach, it’s costly and produces low results.
Good street cops can be what the army calls, a force multiplier. They can recruit the eyes and ears that they need to be effective. In 15 minutes a cop can educate 6 or 7 concerned citizens sitting in someone’s living-room, exactly what it is that officers need to be effective. This is time well spent.
What kinds of things are taught at such meetings? Well, in brief, it begins with recording times, dates, locations, addresses, license plates, car descriptions, etc., but not putting citizens at risk! This project could pertain to a drug house, could be a dealer in stolen goods, who knows, but eventually patterns DO arise, then police attention gets more focused and then next thing the public knows is some bad guys are being taken down and a whole bunch of crimes are solved.
It’s exciting and rewarding to see this happen and best of all it’s not rocket science, it is just basic police science. This area of law enforcement hasn’t really changed all that much in the last hundred years. It doesn’t take much money to organize those eyes and ears either and this the ultimate payoff of being pro-active, because it’s so cost effective!
So, even in this day of high technology you still have to get the uniform guys out of their marked patrol cars (and quit spinning the wheels just roll up patrol miles for stats). You still have to bring the officers into contact with the people, people who need the protection the most. You can only do this by changing the way officers do patrol… to maximize their individual and collective efforts. This may mean freeing them up for those time consuming repetitive tasks and often robotic report taking and allowing them to concentrate on high priorities where it will make a real difference. This is where good leadership comes in, people willing to take a little risk and break from tradition.
It boils down to working smarter…NOT harder.
Every police officer worthy of his title loves to hunt criminals, they want to make a difference! But, somewhere along the way the bureaucrats and pencils pushers layered them with paper work. At the same time liberal courts restricted them. In this litigious society lawyers put law enforcement on the defensive, this led to their own supervisors failing to support street cops and we lost a whole lot in the process. Efficiency dropped and when the manpower drops these other things become acutely apparent! This must change so cops can be cops. When that happens, wow, folks let me tell you, those crooks in our community won’t know what hit them!
Once you’ve motivated your police force and engaged your community the battle is half over! You are now ready to re-established dominance over the criminal element and good things are sure to follow. Even department sick time and worker comp injuries are reduced when things are happening… as they should (I think high sick time is more a symptom of bad moral than illnesses.)
All this innovation and creativity doesn’t mean you’re releasing jack booted thugs on hapless citizens either, it just means you (citizens and police supervisors) are encouraging all officers to be the ultimate in their profession and that is a good “street” cop. And you civilians may wonder now, so what’s a good street cop? This area could take a book to explain, but let me just say: He (or she) is a crime fighting super cop. He’s a parole agent, a probation officer, a drug enforcement officer, a detective, a crime scene investigator, a community service officer and more. He has what almost appears to be superhuman powers to read minds and see what the ordinary person doesn’t see. He uses clues like Sherlock Holmes and he works with his team of citizens to identify, isolated and eliminate the bad guys. That’s a good street cop!
Getting back to innovations…when was the last time you saw patrol officers using cars borrowed off a car lot for patrol duty? Police see a lot more criminal violations from a plain car, and I DO NOT MEAN a 4 door Crown Vic with no decals. I mean a real plain car. There are so many ways to get this policing job done and put the fear into the bad guys! And the best part is, cops love doing it, but it takes an extra effort and leaders with that special kind of mindset to launch these programs and think outside the box.
Any cop can do more if he wants by just using his own creative system and any department can increase efficiency many times over, but it takes good leadership and a will to look for new ways of doing the old job. Times may be tough, but for the good department it is just a challenge to be answered with a victory.
Believe me, when officers are given the green light with a clear mission objective, they are there for us every time, even in a recession! This is the kind of high speed enthusiasm and directed energy that it will take now. A department operating with limited manpower needs this energy and focus to succeed, but it has to come from the top down by a motivated leader.