Areas of Denver with the most calls for police service and the highest population have the fewest officers per capita patrolling them, a Denver Post study of police deployment shows.
A resident living on the city’s northeast side has nearly twice as many officers protecting him as someone living in southwest Denver, even though the southwest area generates four times as many calls for police service, staffing data show.
Police in Denver say determining deployment is a complicated process that relies to a certain extent on street knowledge as well as crime data and population. Other factors, such as geography and crime patterns, also come into play.
“It’s a much greater issue than simply number of calls and number of officers,” said Steve Cooper, the patrol division chief. “There’s a lot more in terms of variables that you have to factor in.”
The newspaper’s review comes as consultants and city officials are analyzing where to locate new police officers and follows a debate over the size of the city’s police force.
Some cities, such as Los Angeles and Shreveport, La., rely on mathematical formulas to determine how to deploy police, but Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman has decided against using such a formula.
“There are formulas,” Whitman said. “But is it easier to do it yourself or to develop a computer program that has to change every 15 minutes when this dynamic place changes?”
The Hanover Justice Group, a New Jersey-based team of consultants reviewing the Police Department’s operations, also believes such formulas can be too rigid.
But Denver’s Police Department still needs to make some critical decisions, such as how much time it wants its officers to dedicate to proactive policing as opposed to responding to emergencies, said Robert Wasserman, a member of the consulting team.
Whitman said District 5, in northeast Denver, shows some of the complex decisions that he and his command staff have to make when deciding where to put officers. That district is home to parts of the new Stapleton and Green Valley Ranch housing developments, which are low-crime areas. Yet its ratio of police per citizen is about the same as other north Denver districts that have twice as many calls for service and arrests.
But Whitman points out that police patrolling in District 5 have nearly 60 square miles of land to cover, more than any other area of the city.
“If you just look at the calls for service, District 5 is overstaffed compared to other districts,” Whitman said. “But based on the size and isolation out there, they are asking for more people.”
The Post’s analysis relied on November staffing data released by the Denver Police Department in response to an open-records request.
It shows that the booming northeast Denver district has 14.5 officers per 10,000 people and logs about 6 percent of the city’s calls for police service – the least calls of any area of the city.
Meanwhile, District 4, in southwest Denver, has nearly half as many officers per 10,000 people: 8.7.
And that district logs more calls for service from citizens than any other district, 23 percent of the city’s calls.
The analysis shows officers are most concentrated in District 6, which includes downtown Denver. While the district is among the least-populated – its numbers swell each day because of commuters and visitors – it had more than twice the arrests in 2004 of any other district in the city.
“During the day, you have a population that comes down to work downtown, and just like any other city, a lot of people are homeless and transient who gravitate to the downtown area,” division chief Cooper said. “Along with those types of populations come a number of different issues that need to be addressed.”
Cynthia Foster, a longtime neighborhood leader in the Athmar Park neighborhood on the city’s southwest side, said she envies the police resources that go downtown. She said she has pushed for more police in her area for 20 years – without success.
“A lot of us living over here have felt that the west side of town is the orphan for many things, not just police, so it fits the profile,” she said.
If the city shifted resources, it could crack down on cruising along Federal Boulevard, something Foster describes as a persistent problem.
“Is it because the downtown has more clout because people spend more there?” she asked. “You can’t say there aren’t panhandlers over here. They’re on every corner.”
The city has ramped up hiring in recent months, but those personnel are still in training and can’t yet be counted as officers.
Denver police officials say they can’t shift officers from the far northeast side of the city to the southwest because there’s too much land to cover in the northeast district.
Already, they point out, it takes an average of nearly four minutes for police to respond to a critical incident in the city’s northeast side, third-worst in the city.
And they say an emergency call of a person wielding a gun in a residential area in the northeast district soaks up all the available resources deployed there.
The far northeast portion of the city also has all the growth, they say. It’s home to a new 24-screen movie theater, new apartments and new residential housing.
In fact, officials plan to add more officers to Districts 2 and 5, both on the city’s northeast side. The main reason those areas will see an infusion of officers stems from the Stapleton redevelopment, officials say.
“It’s beginning to pick up in terms of commercial activity and new residences there,” said Capt. William Nagle, in charge of crime analysis for the Police Department. “That had basically been a dead area. We had to restructure districts to accommodate growth in that area.”
Nagle said the city will add two squad cars to each of those districts this year. It would require an additional 24 officers to staff those four squad cars on a full-time basis, he said.
Nagle said the city may staff the cars on a part-time basis, but no final decision has been made.
The investment in the Stapleton area will use up a sizable chunk of the extra police personnel approved for this year by the Denver City Council and Mayor John Hickenlooper.
The council and Hickenlooper bolstered the police force’s authorized strength by 41, up to 1,446 employees, and hiring is underway.
But Nagle said the city has no plans to add extra squad cars or officers to the city’s other districts.
As of now, the rest of the personnel increase probably will go toward more detectives at headquarters and other initiatives, not additional patrols elsewhere, Nagle said.
The decision not to put new patrols in other areas of the city concerns Denver Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz, head of the council’s safety committee. Faatz, who represents far southwest Denver, said the council expected the new officers would be spread throughout the city. She worries that southwest Denver isn’t getting its fair share of new police.
“I don’t intend to get shortchanged,” Faatz said. “I’m not trying to put other districts at a disadvantage. I just want to be sure they all have adequate cover. But our guys in District 4 are spread thin, and we need more officers.”
Although the districts with high-crime areas aren’t getting more officers, they are getting more flexibility in how they use the officers they have to address hot crime areas.
The Westwood neighborhood in District 4 in southwest Denver is a test-case scenario for how the department plans to do more with limited resources.
“We’re always having to do more with less,” said District 4’s commander, Rudy Sandoval.
Officers patrolling Westwood say the neighborhood has about 14,000 people living there, half of them in rental housing. It also accounted for 10 homicides in 2004 – a year the city logged 93 homicides overall.
The city isn’t giving District 4 any more officers this year. Sandoval, however, is redeploying his special tactical teams to engage in proactive policing there.
The idea is to use those teams and officers already patrolling the area to address minor crimes, such as graffiti, loitering and loud partying. By addressing such quality-of-life issues, Sandoval hopes to create an environment that will allow citizens to take back their neighborhood.
It will mean more work for officers already patrolling Westwood – officers such as Kevin Osborne, who one recent night in Westwood counseled teenager Nicholas Perea to steer clear of the gangs.
“They’re going to just light you up if they think you’re with the West Side Bloods,” Osborne told Perea, who already has reported receiving death threats from a neighbor.
“You’ve got to feel the loss before you wake up,” continued Osborne, counseling Perea outside Perea’s front door, a porch light keeping night at bay. “You won’t know what I’m talking about until you’re standing over a casket of someone you love.”
Computer-assisted reporting editor Jeffrey A. Roberts contributed to this report.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-820-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
