In a misguided attempt to tell Mayor John Hickenlooper to stop taking them for granted, the Denver City Council hopped off his lap and staked a foolish claim.
Absent data, research or fiscal prudence and led by former Republican state legislator Jeanne Faatz, they assembled a super-majority to override the mayor’s budget and add 19 police officers to the department’s authorized strength of 1,427 officers.
It’s notable that Councilwomen Kathleen MacKenzie and Peggy Lehman kept their wits about them and voted against the budget amendment.
Faatz is the council’s fiscal conservative and, thanks to her years in the statehouse – where the legislative branch, not the executive, controls the budget – she’s earned high marks for asking tough fiscal questions and understanding the answers.
Responding to ample anecdotes about exhausted officers working overtime on city business because of insufficient personnel, the council wants to allocate more than $600,000 from Denver’s emergency reserve to fund an additional 19 officers.
They chose neither to cut other operating expenses nor programs to pay for the new officers. That, despite the fact that in a mere five years, the impact of the new hires on Denver’s operating budget – the general fund – will balloon to nearly $6 million.
It’s like taking money from your savings account to upgrade your cable service. You’ve increased expenses without reducing costs or adding revenue.
The override was particularly myopic because Hickenlooper is poised to hire renowned criminologist George L. Kelling and his team to evaluate every operation of the police department from data collection to crimefighting strategies.
Kelling’s team has a strong track record of reducing crime in cities with much worse problems than Denver: New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Based on the theory that keeping order begins with attending to petty crime and chronic offenders, Kelling’s broken-windows approach is data-rich, outcome-based and community-friendly.
Successful policing, according to Kelling, depends on the accountability of police departments for the crime rate. Using the Compstat program (comparable statistics), the department collects timely statistics, using the information to monitor crime levels in specific geographic locations. When the data reveals trouble spots, district captains must devise tactics to drive down crime spikes. If they fail, they lose their commands.
Denver’s police officials claim to use a Compstat model, but it’s clear that the entire four-pronged program – timely data collection, rapid deployment of resources, effective response tactics and relentless follow-up – isn’t in place.
Denver’s protocol, Command Operations Review and Evaluation (CORE) is Compstat lite. It has not resulted in either improved tracking or crime reduction through effective information gathering and resource deployment.
Early in his tenure, Chief Gerry Whitman insisted upon vigorous record keeping and data tracking. His focus on information technology irritated the Police Protective Association so much that the executive committee opposed Whitman’s reappointment in July 2003.
Has Whitman abandoned his emphasis on data-based management? In his April 2005 letter to Hickenlooper’s budget office, he asked for an additional 267 cops, despite his inability to provide good data about crime rates and the deployment of officers.
The City Council should have paid attention when chief of staff Cole Finegan said the mayor would support a budget supplemental to hire more cops, if Kelling’s comprehensive analysis and action agenda recommends it.
In the meantime, the City Council is suggesting Hickenlooper throw more money at a problem that hasn’t been thoroughly defined or analyzed, based on inadequate information, constituent pressure and fear. In addition, they’ve violated the first rule of responsible governance: Do not spend budget reserves for anything but one-time expenditures – particularly personnel costs, which increase dramatically every year.
I’m glad Denver’s council isn’t overseeing my household budget.
Susan Barnes-Gelt (bs13@qwest.net) served eight years on the Denver City Council and was an aide to former Denver Mayor Federico Pena. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.
