Those 30 cops

Did we need them or not? After sitting in a hot, sweaty, stinky room 260 in the Municipal Building for more than two hours last night and listening to the study results, I'm not sure I can say yes. The bottom line, I think, was that we needed 13 - 25 patrol officers and 9 sergeants to supervise them as of last September 2007. That's the data for 2 months before we added the 30 new officers. However, we haven't ever been told just exactly what those 30 officers we hired are doing. How many are patrol? (Also, according to Noble Wray "patrol" doesn't count the 11 - 12 neighborhood officers and 30 Community Policing Team Officers. However, I thought we had less neighborhood officers than that. And those officers do answer patrol calls.) Also, the consultant only studied the staff for roughly half the department and ignored the question of if we have enough civilian support or if our command structure was appropriate. And, at several points during the presentation, the consultant said "depending upon what you want for your community" and I'm not sure who is answering that question for the consultant.

Additionally, the study has admitted flaws in that it is based on the calls to the 911 center. First, there were admitted flaws in that data. (Tho they said the bad data was a better mechanism to use than trying ot compare us to other cities or using a 1.9 officers per 1000 population ratio.) Second, they only counted calls that actually get answered, not the ones that get dropped. Which explains why they want to move two officers from East and four officers from Central to the other districts. If they only measure what the police have time to answer, they're not going to include all those quality of life calls from downtown . . . and instead, they are rewarding the areas where those calls do get answered, with even more officers. The study also assumes that all calls are answered by Madison Police Department and doesn't count the officers from UW and Capital Police that might respond to the calls as well.

It was a relatively rough crowd in that alders asked many questions last night. The consultant was grilled on the quality of the data and asked questions like if they looked at if we could cut down officer time by having less officers respond to incidents (do we need 3 or 4 officers to respond). And asked if it takes 1.9 officers for each car we have on the street due to time off and non-patrol duties, how does that compare to other cities. (Answer, its a little high, its typically 1.6 - 1.8.) And they asked how many hours our officers were working in a year if they worked 6 on and 3 off. (Answer 1946 hours in a year. Apparently we spend more time in training our officers than other departments.) And the questions weren't coming from the skeptical lefties, they were coming from those who championed the 30 officers. I think they might be suffering from a little buyers remorse now that they are looking at the impact of that decision on the upcoming budget.

Another interesting point was that we weren't seeing some dramatic increase in crime. The crime in the city was staying relatively steady over the past few years according to the consultant.

Other recommendations that they have for us are:

• We need better data collection and need to look at our dispatch policies.
• We need to train our officers to better track the work they do.
• We need to look at the codes we use to collect the data.
• We need to better document when we are on "priority call only" or "injury and blockage" status.
• We need to better collect data on the number of officers available at various times.
• We should consider changing two two power shifts in addition to the 3 regular shifts to better cover the busiest times of the day. (This requires us buying more squad cars.)
• If the cars are too expensive, consider putting two officers in a car.
• Redeploy the officers within existing shifts to better cover where we need more help. (I think this was moving two officers from East and four officers from downtown.)
  

In the end, I think the bottom line is that we have enough officers at this point and we just need to fill the positions we have. This became clear when Alder Rhodes-Conway asked so "we don't need to authorize the positions, we need to fill them?" And Noble Wray answered "that is correct". Noble Wray also said that in February 2009 "we will definitely be within the range" of necessary officers. However, when Alder Schumacher asked directly what the impacts for 2009 would be and Noble Wray said that we might be looking at adding more supervisors, but we couldn't make decisions about more cars fast enough before the staffing decisions for 2009 needed to be made.

So, there you have it. It was kind of, in the end, clear as mud. The bottom lines weren't as clear as one might have hoped. I think we have all the officers we need, but without more details, who knows. Perhaps NOW we can find out how those 30 new officers are being used?