Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper said Thursday that he’s concerned about new statistics showing police productivity plunging but wants to find out more details to avoid acting rashly.
“Of course it’s concerning, but we have to go through the numbers,” the mayor said.
The Denver Police Department expects officers to initiate an investigation once every three hours of discretionary time. In September, following a series of discipline controversies, that rate dropped to once every six hours, city statistics obtained by The Denver Post show.
“Most of our police officers come in every day and work their full shift and work eight hours and get paid their eight hours,” the mayor said. “If that’s not the case, we need to sit down and address it.”
The decline in officer-initiated investigations undercuts a strategy the mayor put in place in 2006 with the help of nationally recognized crime-fighting consultants. The theory of the data-driven overhaul held that officers shouldn’t wait for crime to develop but should initiate investigations on their own when they have time to do so to root out criminals before they strike.
The mayor said he has tasked his special assistant for police issues, David Edinger, with mining performance data further to try to determine what is causing the steep slippage in investigations that officers initiate on their own.
He said he wants to determine whether certain age groups of officers are more hesitant to act and whether specific precincts are being affected by the slowdown.
“It’s one possibility that it’s younger officers who are genuinely nervous that they might be more at risk,” the mayor said.
Response to resignation
He added that before he took office in 2003, such productivity statistics weren’t kept.
“It’s good for all police officers that we can measure these things now and not go off half-cocked,” Hickenlooper said.
The mayor brushed aside talk that officers have initiated a work slowdown in response to the recent resignation of Safety Manager Ron Perea, who was popular with the police force.
Perea resigned in August, three months after taking over the role of running the city’s Police, Fire and Sheriff departments after civic leaders complained that he was issuing light discipline to officers accused of excessive force.
Union leaders say that now that Perea is gone, officers are worried about remaining aggressive on the streets for fear they’ll get fired by a discipline system they describe as gone awry. But those union officials deny that any organized work slowdown is underway, which would violate the contract negotiated in collective bargaining.
Two City Council members said they found the decline in investigations initiated by officers a disturbing trend.
“I think it’s time to pull in the chief and sit down with the chief and the union,” said Councilman Michael Hancock, who is one of several officials often mentioned as a potential mayoral candidate in 2011. “No one wins when the police are not on task and doing what the public expects them to do.”
Councilman Doug Linkhart said he thinks the recent controversies involving police “are the tip of the iceberg in terms of people’s feelings about the department.”
Crimes have fallen
Linkhart, who plans to run for mayor if Hickenlooper becomes governor, said the latest productivity statistics “raise a lot of other concerns about the basic performance in the department.”
He added: “Reacting to crime is just chasing crime down after it happens. The proactive work is the most valuable.”
Hickenlooper said he was heartened to see that the public continued to call and seek help from the Police Department. He said that should dispel fears from some community leaders who had predicted that discipline controversies involving police would cause the public to fear police officers and to stop seeking their help.
The mayor added that the decline in officer-initiated investigations hasn’t resulted in a surge in criminal activity.
Statistics the mayor’s office recently released show that reported offenses are down by about 9 percent during the first nine months of this year, compared with the same period last year.
Reported offenses in September, when the steep decline in officer- initiated investigations took place, are down about 4 percent from a year earlier. Calls to police for service increased slightly last month — up 6 percent from September 2009.
“Crime is going down, and that’s the primary goal,” the mayor said, noting that some see a high level of officer-initiated action as an intrusion.
“If the police force can continue to reduce crime for the next 10 years and have less police-initiated action, who’s going to argue with that?”
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com
