The retirement of well-known Denver Police Sgt. David O’Shea-Dawkins means the city is losing an exemplary cop and is a sympton of a larger challenge – crime is up, arrests are off and police presence on our streets is stretched too thin.
Chief Gerry Whitman told the City Council’s safety committee this week that the 1,444-officer department will need another 267 cops, and 138 civilian support staff, to keep up with Denver’s population (which grew 19 percent between 1990 and 2004 to 556,835). Arrests are down 35 percent from seven years ago.
Some 80 veterans have retired so far in 2005, and 40 more will hang up their guns by year’s end. “When you take retirements and the fact that we have to fill in for the years [the Webb administration] wasn’t running the academy, we’re behind the eight ball,” said Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz, chair of the safety committee.
Meeting twin goals of training additional officers and replacing retirees could strain the police academy, which can handle classes of up to 50 recruits for a 22- to 24-week training program and also run smaller classes simultaneously.
Faatz said the goal is for the department to be up to strength within two years. Whitman told the committee that $13 million a year would be needed to pay 200 additional officers. (Initially, rookie cops at $39,144 a year cost less than eight-year veterans paid $60,024 annually.)
Whitman partly attributed the drop in arrests to officers who fear being disciplined if complaints are filed. Faatz thinks rank-and-file cops “feel the hierarchy is against them and they’re afraid to get into incidents.”
The council and Mayor John Hickenlooper are committed to beefing up the department, but Whitman may not get all he wants at once.
We hope the new cops are like O’Shea-Dawkins, a pioneer in community policing who joined the force in 1970. He was wounded in the leg during a 1973 shootout at the Crusade for Justice, leaving one leg shorter than the other. During his recuperation he studied the Hispanic civil rights group to better understand it.
When California-based street gangs arrived here in the late-1980s, O’Shea-Dawkins traveled to Los Angeles to learn about them from the LAPD and became Denver’s first expert on gangs. By treating them like human beings, he established rapport with gang members and wannabes. In off hours, he tried to help steer youths away from gangs through mentoring programs.
We look for as much commitment and ingenuity as the chief fills his upcoming openings.
