Philadelphia Inquirer
Sunday, October 5, 1997

A hard look at how police are deployed

The mayor and department are formulating a new plan for assigning the city's officers. Critics - noting flaws in the current plan - say it's overdue.

By Craig R. McCoy and Clea Benson,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Inquirer staff writers Suzanne Sataline and Dianna Marder also contributed to this report.

The last time the Philadelphia Police Department overhauled deployment, patrol cars were red, officers used call boxes instead of radios, and a swaggering veteran cop named Frank Rizzo was commissioner.

Today, police cars are white and blue, and some officers communicate with headquarters by computer.

But the basic approach to distributing officers across the city's 23 police districts has not changed.

Now, in the face of political pressure, anxiety about the city's drug problem, and Philadelphia's failure to curb crime as dramatically as some other cities, the Police Department and Mayor Rendell are putting the finishing touches on a new deployment plan.

While the Rendell administration has kept quiet about what's in the plan - it says it's waiting for renowned crime fighter William Bratton to provide input - others are calling for a lively, open debate. And critics are pointing to what they see as flaws in the current deployment pattern.

The police have always been reluctant to disclose much about the distribution of officers, but the broad outlines of how the force operates were detailed in documents submitted to City Council this year.

Those documents, a snapshot of the force in May, show that:

Some police districts have more than three times as many cops in relation to population as do others. The 16th District, in West Philadelphia, has 5.1 officers per 1,000 people, while the Eighth District, in the Northeast, has 1.3 per 1,000.

The deployment of officers in relation to crime rates also varies widely by district, causing disparate workloads. Each officer in Center City must cope with an average of 43 serious crimes per year, the documents show, while officers in Roxborough's Fifth District face an average of 13. Outside analysts have repeatedly urged the department to correct such imbalances.

About 57 percent of the 6,600 officers on the payroll in May were assigned to street duty, a higher proportion than in other major cities. An additional 18 percent were on special squads, such as narcotics, stakeout and SWAT teams. Police brass, detectives, recruits and 911 operators made up the rest.

The biggest special unit was narcotics, with 251 officers, which some critics say is too few. In a rare break from the administration's policy of silence on deployment, Police Commissioner Richard Neal suggested in an interview Friday that the new plan would increase that figure.

Redeploying the force is a complex, politically risky undertaking. Geography is one factor. Policing philosophy also plays a role:

Should the priority be fast response to a 911 call? Should some calls be ignored or answered more slowly, so officers can haul away an abandoned car or attend a community meeting? Should the department staff heavily in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods at the cost of slower response in others?

Pressure is building on the administration to find answers that will allay doubts about the department's effectiveness.

``We've got to deploy our police in a way that gives our people an effective advantage'' against crime, City Council President John F. Street. said. ``It's not happening now.''

``Right now, we have fear that is created in many people's minds by a lack of information,'' City Councilman-at-large Angel Ortiz said. ``An educated public is a public that feels secure.''

Ortiz said a computer analysis of the May deployment figures by his staff raised doubts about whether every area of the city had its fair share of officers. The analysis shows that while the South Philadelphia Police Division, made up of four districts, has the city's lowest violent-crime rate, the staffing level in relation to population is among the highest of any division.

``You put people where the crime is happening,'' Ortiz said. ``It's the old Willie Sutton adage: `Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is.' Where do you put police? Where the crime is. And it seems we don't have that kind of framework in mind.''

In the interview Friday, Neal said the numbers could be deceptive, because special units that don't show up in division totals bolster the police presence in high-crime areas. Citing one such area, Kensington, he ticked off squad after squad that had been deployed there, including special drug, arson, homicide, stakeout and probation teams.

He said deployment was determined by a welter of factors, including crime patterns, calls for assistance, geography and population.

``It's a very delicate balance,'' Neal said. ``. . . You really have to weigh what kinds of calls you're not going to respond to.''

He said the deployment figures given to City Council - and provided to The Inquirer by Ortiz - may not fully capture how the force operates today. For one thing, he said, about 300 officers have joined the ranks since May, with virtually all assigned to street duty.

While saying he was constantly reexamining deployment, Neal also declared: ``I think the allocation of officers is appropriate.''

The pressure on the department to do better stems, in part, from evidence that innovative approaches - computerized mapping of crime, zero tolerance for nuisance offenses, and tough accountability for police commanders - have paid handsome dividends elsewhere.

Despite a tight budget, Rendell has expanded the department, using federal funds to hire several hundred rookie officers. The force should number 7,000 next year.

The mayor also has worked to free officers for street duty by hiring civilians to handle certain jobs, such as guarding cell blocks. Civilians hold 22 percent of the jobs in the department, twice as large a share as a decade ago.

Philadelphia ranks second among the nation's 10 largest cities in the number of officers per 1,000 residents. (Chicago is first.) Philadelphia also remains among the safest large cities, according to FBI data, and Rendell recently released figures showing that crime fell sharply in the first six months of this year.

But Philadelphia has not shared in the eye-opening reductions in crime that have palpably bolstered public safety in New York. Over the summer, a bipartisan group of state legislators called on Rendell to adopt the techniques behind New York's success.

The new study on deployment, first promised for midyear, is now expected by the end of the year. Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner often credited with the steep crime drop there, was offered a contract last week to troubleshoot a preliminary document now in Rendell's hands.

In an interview last week, Bratton said it was hard to make choices among competing priorities for police.

``What's Abe Lincoln's expression?'' he asked. `` `You can please some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time.' Resource allocation is somewhat like that.''

Jack Greene, a Temple University criminologist who has worked closely with the police, commends the department for using innovative deployment tactics, such as mobile ministations, but says the brass need to look at a bigger picture. Over the years, he noted, the department's emphasis has seesawed between general patrols and special units targeted to problem areas.

``You're robbing Peter to pay Paul in an environment of fixed resources,'' he said. ``That's not really a deployment plan. The plan is being driven by its pieces rather than stepping back and saying, `What are our wants and capacities?' ''

Greene has advocated redrawing police-district lines so they coincide with other key service maps, such as Health Department districts and liquor-code enforcement zones.

The theory is this would encourage cooperation among agencies - and prompt other arms of government to see crime fighting as their concern, too. After raiding a crack house, the thinking goes, the police could work with housing officials to seal the building and with tax officials to go after the owner.

Neal took a dim view of that approach. He said many citizens had longstanding attachments to the current police-district boundaries and would not welcome change.

The current deployment study is the first serious review of its kind since a well-known study done in 1986 under Commissioner Kevin Tucker. That report identified some problems that appear to linger today, including that:

Special, centralized units were draining street patrols and taking troops away from district commanders.

``I don't know why we have [193 police officers] in traffic,'' said Street, referring to the current deployment. ``Could we do it with 50 people? What is stakeout? Do we need 51 of them? You and I have no way of knowing.''

The boundaries of police districts and the patrol sectors within them were outdated and the workload of police officers imbalanced as a result.

The department needed to change the way it handled 911 calls so that urgent calls would get immediate attention.

Neal said that progress had been made on that front and that 8 percent of 911 calls - those with a lower priority - are now routed to units not on emergency patrol.

Still, by the reckoning of police union leader Richard Costello, the current review of deployment is a paper shuffle that hides a core problem: Philadelphia has 1,000 fewer police officers today than it did 20 years ago.

``The reason we're going through all these gyrations is we're trying to plug six holes in the dike with three fingers,'' Costello said. ``We are still taking water. We didn't have these problems when we had sufficient personnel to do all the jobs.''

However these issues are finally resolved, said Greene, the Temple professor, the debate is long overdue.

``What you're doing is moving the Police Department to a point where it's becoming analytic about what its market is and where its goods and services are,'' he said. ``And I think, in the past, many police departments never considered any of those things.''