Policing: Effective policing counts on data

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NorthJersey.com

Effective policing counts on data

Sunday, April 23, 2006

By CRISTIAN SALAZAR
HERALD NEWS

PATERSON -- Police Director Michael C. Walker is a numbers guy -- and he runs his department by the numbers, too.

He speaks with a statistician's love for numbers about the department's 98 percent homicide solvability rate, the 204,296 calls for service in 2005, or the 4 percent increase in calls for service he expects this year.

At a recent monthly meeting about crime statistics, the 25-year veteran of the police force, a big man with an almost hexagonal-shaped face and ruddy skin, seemed obsessed with the patterns that emerged from them -- an increase in aggravated assaults near Auburn Street and Broadway, for instance, or that robbery seemed to peak at 9:30 p.m. on certain weekdays.

The numbers matter to him, Walker said, because he is trying to run a department that is transparent, effective, accountable and within a tight budget.

"I'm Scottish," he would often say. "I don't waste money."

Walker, who was appointed as police director (a civilian position held by a retired police officer) in 2004 to deal with the budget, personnel and policy of the department (Chief James Wittig handles the day-to-day operations), has what many might consider an unenviable task: running an efficient organization while attempting to deter crime in the third-largest city in New Jersey, a city perceived by even its own residents as unsafe and flooded with illegal drugs.

To this end, in the nearly three years he has been on the job, Walker, who retired as a Paterson cop in 2002, has helped reorganize how police patrol the city, launched new efforts to clamp down on crime hot spots, improved the department's reliance on cutting-edge technology and upgraded key facilities.

But he still faces daunting challenges -- the need for more police officers to patrol the city, for instance, and fixing up the building that houses the police headquarters, which he said has "suffered from benign neglect."

The good news, though, is that in the first three months of this year, crime dropped about 8 percent, according to the April 5 CompStat Report. Walker hesitated to attribute the decrease to the new efforts.

In fact, ask residents and they will often say they don't feel safe in the city -- though some have observed an increased police presence in the streets.

Making his job count

Walker's office is on the second floor of the aging police headquarters, the squat Frank X. Graves Public Safety Complex on Broadway. His desk is littered with piles of official documents, books on crime and copies of the brightly colored CompStat reports that he relies on to make strategy decisions.

As police director, he works 39 hours every two weeks. He also teaches criminal justice as a full-time assistant professor at Passaic County Community College and, frequently, a student is in his office, helping him to sift through the data that comes at him daily.

"I don't have enough manpower to place police officers where I need them," Walker said during a recent interview.

Since November 2005, the department has been advocating for an additional 100 cops. In March, the police academy, which is housed in the basement of police headquarters, graduated 32 rookies, who took to the streets in early April for the first time. He said he has put in a proposal for another 50 officers who would graduate by December.

The proposed 2006 budget for the police department is about $40 million, an increase of 11 percent over last year's approximately $36 million, with most of the new spending encompassing salary and wages. The proposed 2006 budget, which takes into account the 50 additional police officers, must be approved by the City Council,

He pointed out that he attempts to fund new initiatives and facility upgrades through state or federal grants such as "Operation Safe Corridor," funded partially through the federal Department of Justice.

But getting public dollars can be a trial. For instance, he said he is working on getting money to move the communications center off-site and upgrade the equipment, but he estimates that would cost about $2 million. A scathing internal report prepared by Lt. G. N. Petrakakis, former commanding officer of the communications center, called the current facility "woefully inadequate" and states that it "pales in comparison to towns a fraction of its size" and that it is "falling apart at the seams."

Walker said the communications center is bad -- but improving incrementally. "We're not going to allow something to go unfixed," he said. "I'm not going to put the lives of the police officers or the city in jeopardy because of technology."

True community policing?

Even without the additional cops, Walker was one of the main cheerleaders of the department's redistricting, which went into effect on Jan. 15, in spite of the increased demands it appears to put on command and patrol officers.

Prior to that date, the city was split into 15 patrol posts under the control of one captain for a period of four days. After those four days, another captain would come on. The result, he said, was a lack of continuity or "sense of ownership" of the neighborhoods -- when one captain would go home, he or she would basically go on vacation.

The new districting splits the city into three pieces, largely along political ward lines. Using the same resources the department had under the old plan, Walker said, the objective is to "achieve efficiency through ownership of your district and post."

"If you don't know where you are working tomorrow, you're not going to care," he said.

Michael Wagers, the executive director of the Police Institute at Rutgers University, said Walker's plan sounds like it follows well-established practices in community policing, which have been adopted across the country, including by Camden and Newark.

"In principle, you have captains in charge of these districts and hold them responsible for the crime," he said. But, he added, the captains can't be held accountable unless they control the resources under their command so that if they see a rash of a certain type of crime emerging they can respond to it. "That's all part of effective policing -- recognizing a pattern when it pops up and being able to respond and having the resources to (do so) without going to the departmental level."

Under the new districting, each captain is responsible for his or her own officers, Walker said, making them virtual "police chiefs" of their own areas. Those officers are deployed according to need, but never leave the district, except for major crimes.

"If you're assigned to district one, you know you work the Totowa or Hillcrest area when you come to work," he said. "That will build familiarity of the people, both good and bad."

This, he said, is true "community policing."

Captain Troy Oswald, on the force since 1992, commands the second district, encompassing the 4th Ward and part of the 3rd, south to Interstate 80. He said the redistricting may be new for Paterson, but it is based on best practices in crime control. "A lot of the management books tell us that you get more effective results if you have ownership," he said.

Oswald gives a lot of credit to Walker for being open to new ideas, including "Operation Impact," which he said he recommended to the director. The program puts extra cops in gang "hotspots," including Godwin and Graham avenues.

Frank Lusk, a police officer in Oswald's district who has been with the force 16 years, said the new districting concept forces cops to get to know the neighborhoods they patrol. "It compels the commanding officer to know his area," he said.

Another patrol officer in the second district, Elizabeth Bola񯳠said it doesn't matter to beat cops how the city is sliced.

"We still have to do our job," she said as she walked with her partner, Osvaldo Torres, along Vreeland Avenue near Eastside Park. Compared to Lusk, Bola񯳠is a fresh face in the department, having served on the force only 2½ years.

"It's the same as before," she said. "We're just focused on the district."

But is it working?

Most people agree that the districting plan is still in its infancy, and will require tweaking down the road. Richard Reyes, the president of the Superior Officers' Association, said the department's seemingly renewed focus on community policing is an oxymoron.

"Isn't every community police officer supposed to do community policing?" he said. The real problem, he believes, is the stagnant wages of police officers. "We can't act pro-law enforcement when we don't give them respect and pay them a good salary," he said.

He believes the department may have made a mistake by disbanding the community policing unit two years ago, which specifically focused on building relationships between the police and the neighborhoods.

"When an officer goes from job to job, he can't focus on any one individual in that neighborhood," Reyes said.

Precious Fletcher, 34, who recently moved to the neighborhood near John F. Kennedy High School, said she felt safer now because police had a large presence there, one of the "Operation Safe Corridor" areas.

"We moved from the North 6th area and you can feel the total difference," she said, standing on Liberty Street. She was with her 4-year-old nephew.

But she wondered why police didn't patrol the area where she used to live. "They should be patrolling down there as much as they should here," she said.

Ricardo Belliard, who lives on Paterson Avenue near John F. Kennedy High School, said he doesn't feel the area is safe. "There are a lot of gangs," he said in Spanish. "They give a bad image to the neighborhood."

Walker admitted that the new efforts to stem crime in Paterson -- whether it is the districting plan, community policing or targeting hotspots -- remain imperfect.

But, he said, the changes have had an effect on the feeling among district captains, who now regularly come into work asking for the latest crime maps.

"Now they are accountable," he said.

Reach Cristian Salazar at (973) 569-7165 or salazarc@northjersey.com.

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