Cutbacks in such places as Oakland, Tulsa and Norton, Mass. have forced police to tell residents to file their own reports — online or in writing — for break-ins and other lesser crimes.
"If you come home to find your house burglarized and you call, we're not coming," said Oakland Police spokeswoman Holly Joshi. The city laid off 80 officers from its force of 687 last month and the department can't respond to burglary, vandalism, and identity theft. "It's amazing. It's a big change for us."
Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation's largest police union, said cutbacks are preventing many police agencies from responding to property crimes.
"The chiefs are putting the best face on this they can," Pasco said. "But think of this: that next property crime could involve a junkie who killed someone the night before."
In Tulsa, which lost 110 officers to layoffs and retirements, the 739-officer department isn't sending cops to the scene of larceny, fraud and car theft.
Tulsa police spokesman Jason Willingham says some residents have said they won't bother to report those crimes any more. "They think nothing is going to be done, so why mess with it," he said.
In the Boston suburb of Norton, police told residents there may be delays or no response at all to some calls, including vandalism. The department posted the new policy on its website.
"We wanted to let people know about this," Norton Police Chief Brian Clark said. "We didn't want people to be surprised."
Bernard Melekian, director of the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, said the actions reflect are a reflection of the hard economic times across the country.
Baltimore Mounted Police Unit Sergeant John Ambrose talks about his officers' connection to the community, ability to fight crime in enhanced ways with the horses' help and the trust between an officer and his equine partner.
Mounted police fading in sunset?
In San Diego, Assistant Police Chief Bob Kanaski says the mounted unit is being cut to save officers' jobs and maintain the ability of officers to respond to emergencies.
Horses from San Diego's mounted patrol unit were auctioned online Thursday.
"Our No. 1 priority is the officer on the street," Kanaski says.
A plan to eliminate the Portland police mounted unit and transfer some of its officers to a bike patrol to save about $585,000 a year was unveiled in January, says Jean Tuller, who served on a committee exploring the issue. Public hearings to address the program's future are planned for March.
Clarksville is disbanding its part-time mounted police unit, which cost about $30,000 to $35,000 in city funds and donations to operate, officer Jim Knoll says.
The nation's three largest cities — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — have mounted forces, and no plans to eliminate them have been announced, representatives of those forces say.
The Baltimore mounted police unit staved off elimination for this year with myriad donations and fundraising efforts that brought in about $100,000 and included everything from a $5,000 contribution by 7-Eleven to the receipts from a lemonade stand operated by Sophia Litrenta, 9, who collected about $2,000 in August, says Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the police commissioner's office.
The unit began in 1888, and is the oldest continuously operated mounted police unit in the nation, Guglielmi says. It costs $200,000, which includes care of the horses, veterinarian bills and horseshoes, among other things, says Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Mayor's Office on Criminal Justice.
"They're part of the city's landscape," Guglielmi says of the city's six horses, Barney, Belle, Binx, Buster, Butch and Slurpee — the latter named after the $5,000 7-Eleven donation.
"They're great for crowd management. They can get in and out of places much faster than police cars, especially in tight urban areas."
In Boston, the 12-horse mounted unit was eliminated last year, but supporters hold out hope it could return.
Nady Peters, whose grandfather was a mounted police officer in Belgium in the 1930s and '40s, began an online petition to save Boston's unit. Peters says the petition includes 2,664 names. There is also a Facebook page, "Save the Boston Police Mounted Unit," with at least 3,157 members. It asks viewers to "imagine another World Series without the horses to clear the streets."
"Except for police dogs, they are the last working animals in this country who are around people who aren't around animals because they are in the city," says Susan Correia, who supported Boston's police horses.
For the Tulsa Police Department, the decision to cut the eight-horse unit and reassign its four officers "was a matter of what you could cut and not impact the basic core services" such as responding to 911 calls, Police Chief Ronald Palmer says.
Jim Barrett of Redding, Calif., the author of A Manual for the Mounted Officer, has trained horses for more than 30 years and warns that once they are gone, "it's darn hard to get them back" because extensive training and equipment are lost.
Martin reports for the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D.
No comments:
Post a Comment