Wear a flak jacket if you go to Monday night’s Denver City Council meeting, when the council takes up Mayor John Hickenlooper’s 2006 budget. A battle is brewing over the size of our police force and the number of new officers the city should hire.
The mayor has developed a plan to reorganize the force and put dozens more officers on the street, and he proposes to train 137 officers next year and add 22 new positions.
Some council members want to add many more, but we have a hard time seeing just what problem they are trying to solve. Overall, Denver is a safe city whose force is already a reasonable size for its population and its problems.
While our crime rate has dropped over the years, recently it is edging up – with an intolerable increase in violent acts. We think a modest increase in the number of city officers is in order.
The Denver Police Department’s authorized strength is 1,405 officers, slightly less than in 1992, although city population has grown by 90,000 to 557,478. Even so, crime dropped sharply from the early ’90s, though 2004 saw a 1.8 percent increase over 2003 (versus 9 percent for the state).
A surge in retirements plus the fact that no class graduated the Police Academy in cash-poor 2002 have caused a manpower crunch. The mayor’s proposal, at a cost of $2.9 million, would bring the force to 1,427.
We think that’s plenty, but the chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, Jeanne Faatz, is proposing a 1,492-officer force in 2006, with 52 officers added each of two following years. Councilman Rick Garcia suggests 60 additional officers.
Those numbers are out of proportion for a city of our size. Denver, with 2.35 cops per 1,000 citizens, has a bigger force than most of 10 comparably sized U.S. cities – and a lower crime rate.
Faatz contends that the cops-per-thousand statistic doesn’t consider such variables as training, civilian support employees, technology and investigatory practices.
Policing expert John Campbell of Portland, Ore., says simply adding officers is no panacea. “Essentially, that is poor management for anyone to assume that if you simply add more cops, you’re automatically safer,” he said. “The question is, ‘To do what?”‘
Hickenlooper wants to use improved technology and steps such as putting civilians in office jobs and buying back officers’ time off to put more existing cops on the street.
Then there’s the question of money. Public safety already gets 49 percent of the general fund budget. Hickenlooper notes that the city must take $12 million from its fleet replacement reserve to balance the 2006 budget. Adding more officers means cutting other items, including within public safety.
We hope the council sees that tapping further into the city’s reserve fund is risky and that an analysis of the size and skills of our force will show it is not now necessary.
