Money Shortage risks Officers and Citizens Safety in Portsmouth

Powershift is reassigned, specialized units are now task with handling calls for service and Portsmouth says they are spending to much on overtime to handle their required day-to-day law enforcement functions. Check out the various document links in the paragraphs below that outlines these major changes that impact the safety of the public and of the police officers working the streets in Portsmouth.

As everyone knows the economy has been in a downward spiral for a little while. When the economy is not so good then tax bases can take hits as part of the fallout. Portsmouth is no different then most other cities, it has revenue issues. Revenue issues impact city services, cutbacks are the norm, doing more with less, hiring freezes etc etc. These cutbacks have to be prioritized and the last place to cut needs to be public safety. Now I am the first to say I don’t know what has happened in other departments but I will show clearly what happened to the police department. They have cut off ALL overtime with the exception of Court over time. Because police respond to essentially random events it is difficult to predict required manning levels in advance. Portsmouth has had a sworn officer authorized strength of 250 officers for sometime, before I was employed and I had been their over 4 years. The way the department dealt with not having enough officers to deal with the day-to-day calls for service was to authorize overtime. Their are times when a whole shift would be held over because of a major incident such as a homicide or robbery. A perfect example of this occurred about a month ago at the American Legion Hall on Peach St. The American Legion had rented the hall out for a “birthday” party. When police were finally called their were HUNDREDs of people inside and outside of the facility. Several Police Officers were hurt trying to regain control of the disorderly group of young adults and juveniles. The incident occurred at shift change and it required BOTH shifts to deal with the magnitude of the incident. In fact I was told by one supervisor that the event would have overwhelmed the midnight shift and that they would have had few if any officers to deal with anything that might have happened during that incident. The evening shift was held over for almost two hours to assist midnight with the incident. Later on during the pay period (within two weeks) the public would be short a full shift of officers for two hours to make up for the two hours of overtime they used that night.

Portsmouth is a small city with a big city crime problem. They have needed more officers on the street for a long period of time but they have dealt with it by using overtime. Now with the current economic situation they say they don’t have the money. To that I will paraphrase what a City Counsel member said at a recent counsel meeting “when we have a project we really want to do we can usually find the money”. To that I say that cutbacks to public safety organizations are fraught with risk to the officers and to the citizens.

Now anyone putting in more time then their normal work week (ie 42.5 hours or 40 hours) are required to “RT” it (a Portsmouth scheduling code) meaning that by the end of the two week pay period they will have to leave early, or come in late or any other way to prevent them from getting paid money for the time they might have worked over during their two week pay period. As an example of how that works the people that worked two hours overtime for the American Legion incident would have to leave two hours earlier on another day prior to the end of the pay period. That day (or evening) that patrol shift is short an officer (or more then one) for that period of time. Less officers on the street to protect and serve, less officers to come to the assistance of their comrades if an officer needs help.

Click cutbacks_memo_1 to see the memo outlining the staffing changes. To make up for the shortages other specialized units now are required to answer calls for service. So that could mean that NIO’s will be out of there neighborhood, TRU-Street crimes units are answering calls for service instead of working on neighborhood drug problems, you get the idea. The “Powershift” was a small group of officer permanently assigned to work 5pm to 3am Wednesday to Saturday. This covered the shifts that statistically had high volumes of calls and provided a group of officers that allowed an organized shift transition covering the time at the end of evening shift and the beginning of midnights when their are few officers on the street to cover calls.

As I start pulling statics from various sources I think I will be able to show that Portsmouth needs an increase in authorized sworn officer strength to maintain a safe and efficient law enforcement organization. They have been using the overtime as a stop-gap measure for years and it appears that the money is no longer available for whatever reason. Again Portsmouth must learn to balance it’s economic efforts with it’s requirement to provide Public Safety services. Holiday Inn’s, Traffic Circles and River Front Crystal lights don’t make the streets safer they just make them prettier. Someone in the Portsmouth government needs to start reevaluating Portsmouth’s spending priority’s and bring Public Safety back to the top of the priority list not the bottom. Portsmouth has the lowest paid Police Officers in the area with the highest crime rate. Click Area Police Pay Comparison to see a pay comparison made in July 2007 of the various local Police Departments salaries. Portsmouth ranks at the bottom on virtually all of them. Click Hampton Roads Cities Crime Statistics Comparison for 2006 to see a crime statistics comparison for the various localities showing that Portsmouth has the highest crime rate in the area when the crime statistics are converted to make the comparison by a 50,000 person population base.

The City of Portsmouth management needs to start looking at the realities of the situation and doing a better job prioritizing there spending. Safety First .. Economic development later ..