As the Denver City Council and Mayor John Hickenlooper wrangle over how many new police officers to hire, comparisons with other cities show Denver’s Police Department is already better staffed than those in most cities of its size, and experts warn that expanding a fully stocked police force is not necessarily the path to reducing crime.
In his budget request to the mayor, Police Chief Gerald Whitman sought 267 new officers, or a 19 percent increase for a force that is already better staffed per resident than those in San Diego; Oklahoma City; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; or Austin, Texas.
After retirements, Whitman’s request would translate to a net gain of 152 officers.
Hickenlooper’s staff slashed the request to 137 new hires, a net gain of 22 officers. Some City Council members are seeking an additional 40 officers.
Even Hickenlooper’s more modest expansion would keep Denver’s department in the top 10 for cities its size, while the crime rate is in the bottom third.
On Friday, Hickenlooper’s acting chief of staff said the mayor expects more production from the officers the city has now.
“We are certainly disappointed that our efforts to make our police force more effective have not been more successful to date,” said Cole Finegan, who also is the city attorney in charge of prosecuting the city’s misdemeanor crimes.
Whitman said his department – with 2.35 officers per 1,000 residents – lags behind the national median of three per thousand.
The FBI says the median for cities with a population of more than 250,000 is 2.8 officers per 1,000 residents.
Whitman said that while the city has expanded geographically and the population has increased, the number of officers has not kept pace: New hires barely offset retirements, and in 2002, the city didn’t hire any new officers.
Other Western cities, such as San Diego, Whitman said, have more civilian employees. Denver is forced to take officers off the street to handle administrative tasks, he said.
The city also is hamstrung by technology that Whitman compares to a “step above a stone tablet” and statistics that aren’t trustworthy.
“We need officers and modernization, and I’ve been asking for that since I became chief” in 2000, Whitman said.
Consultants and academics who study police staffing and tactics say modernization and research to decide how to deploy officers are critical to an efficient police force. Adding more officers, several said, is no panacea.
“People have the perception that when they see more police and patrol cars, they are safer. But that isn’t the reality,” said John Campbell, president of Campbell Delong Resources, a company that helps cities construct policing plans. “What people need to ask and have answered is, ‘If we hire more officers, what will be different? Where will they be? What is the plan?”‘
Historical and current data indicate that reducing crime does not necessarily go hand in hand with hiring more cops.
In the 1990s, San Diego, which had a similar crime rate to New York, substantially reduced crime with 1.7 officers per 1,000 residents. At the same time, Portland, where the crime rate once exceeded New York’s, achieved a nationally recognized turnaround by redeploying a force with two officers per 1,000 residents.
Denver is safer than Cleveland; Milwaukee; Nashville, Tenn., and a number of other similarly sized cities with far more officers, according to the crime indexes.
By contrast, some of the nation’s most violent cities are those with the most fully staffed police departments.
Baltimore, with a population just slightly larger than Denver’s, has 4.9 officers per 1,000 residents. Baltimore had 278 murders last year – three times Denver’s 91 homicides.
Washington, D.C., with 6.39 officers per 1,000 residents, had 198 homicides. Pre-Katrina New Orleans’ force of 3.5 officers per 1,000 residents responded to 265 homicides in 2004.
“Using ratios and making those type of agency-to-agency comparisons is not a great help because they don’t take in a wide array of factors varying in communities,” said Joseph Brann, a police consultant who was the first director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the U.S. Department of Justice.
Whitman acknowledges that the officer-per-resident ratio is not the best measuring stick for gauging the need for new hires.
“But we have to do something to get people’s attention,” he said.
Criminal-justice experts say a police department needs to know where it’s coming from and where it’s going before hiring new officers.
“There needs to be a hard analysis, looking at workloads, methods of response, crime trends,” said Michael Scott, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School and former police chief in Lauderhill, Fla. “The political discussion of ‘we need more police’ is usually simplistic. The policy discussion is more difficult.”
Such an analysis is at least 18 months away for Denver, which is awaiting a new computer system, Whitman said. The department has been trying for years to get funding for the computer overhaul.
There hasn’t been an examination into the efficiency of the department – at least one that has been made public – including, among other things, a breakdown of response times for different types of calls and how investigations are prioritized and managed.
In his budget request, Whitman didn’t disclose how he would use the additional hires, other than to say they would be spread throughout the department.
Whitman said if his request is ultimately cut to the net gain of 22 officers, he will put those officers in northeast Denver – an area whose population has grown in the past few years – and have them focus on “crimes against persons.”
While Denver’s overall crime rate was up 1.8 percent in 2004, the number of arrests dipped for the seventh year in a row.
Some City Council members say the declining arrest rate may be attributed to not having enough officers on the streets.
Still, arrest rates have been down all over the country for the past decade, according to the FBI, and the reasons are elusive and multifaceted.
For instance, a large drug bust in one area could cut arrests there for months because the supply has gone away, Scott said.
Staff writer Karen E. Crummy can be reached at 303-820-1594 or kcrummy@denverpost.com.
