Wilmington Cutbacks of Police and Firefighters

Since September or so, there has been an ongoing drama in the City of Wilmington over a $5M budget shortfall and extensive budget cuts that have included the layoff of police officers and firefighters. There is a great deal about this story that is pretty dysfunctional (including how revenues suddenly went very soft shortly after the City’s budget was approved), but these first responders own some part of this dysfunction.

No one wants to see first responders cut back. But one of the things that is especially true about the WPD is that they have been remarkably effective in extracting resources from taxpayers without having to be especially responsive to the taxpayers making that investment. The WPD has had the highest number of officers in history over the past two years and the city still has a record numbers of shootings in 2010. (The City’s crime numbers fluctuate — 2008 was a brutal year, while 2009 was less so.) That would lead you to think that either this department is being overwhelmed or they aren’t effectively using the resources they have. If you listen to the folks protesting these cutbacks, you’d think that the City was much less safe without the 5 officers now gone. But when they had their almost fully authorized strength, they’d insist that they can’t prevent everything, that they can’t arrest their way out of Wilmington’s crime problem, that they could only do so much anyway.

I actually agree with that, though. No city can arrest their way out of the problems that Wilmington has. And I’m certain that if you had a cop on every corner in the city, you wouldn’t get anywhere near eliminating crime. But it is irresponsible for these folks to now claim that falling back to a very slightly smaller authorized strength is any scarier than the past year that City residents have had to live with. 340 (+/-) uniformed cops couldn’t stop a record year of shootings and 5 fewer *management positions* won’t make one damn bit of difference to patrols or the city’s crime rate.

The city eliminated 2 lieutenant positions, 3 sergeant positions and one patrol position. They also eliminated 3 vacant positions. And the Director of Public Safety position (part of the Mayor’s Office) is no more. Other positions in the city were eliminated and I hear that more may be coming. But the *people* in those positions aren’t gone — they are allowed by their contract to bump down a level, which eventually bumps out the most junior of the force. So people on the street shouldn’t change, although that is hard to know. And it isn’t as though this department shouldn’t be rethinking how to get more of its uniforms out on the street rather than doing IT or personnel tasks. But we are still left with approx. 4.5 officers per thousand residents here. Philadelphia is about 4.4 per thousand.

A group of Wilmington community leaders and City Council people have been working for the past 4 years or so to get the City to implement a genuine community policing strategy (think the New Haven model) throughout the city. When this started, the Chief made sure that it was well known that he would not implement the kind of strategy proposed with his current authorized strength and needed to get to about 340 to do it. He got his authorized strength and in spite of a model community policing deployment plan being out there, both the Chief and the Mayor have insisted that they do not need to change their current policing model. They might be right. But there is little to recommend about the strategy that seems to not be able to manage the current crisis. And the community policing model would put community patrol units in neighborhoods on a 24/7 basis — rather than treating community police as special units. Mayor Baker has been scornful and belittling of those taxpayers asking for a change in thinking. Except the downtown business community who *did* get 24/7 community policing last year. The residents of the city, the people paying the property taxes (that went up twice to pay for the fact that the city wouldn’t look at paring back over the last few years) are left to live with the increased shootings and not much hope that these will slow down.

One thing that interests me is the minimal outcry over these layoffs. I don’t hear this as a major topic of conversation among my neighbors — in fact, I think most of them are pointedly not expecting much more from the WPD until there is a new administration. Email points out that while the police union wants the city to cut back on take home cars (so do I), they are asking for more take home vehicles for their members. So we’re basically in an argument over who gets more tax dollars — not really concerned about public safety or quality of life. On the other hand, the City has a real financial problem — one that is going to require them to pare down even more (and they can afford some of this paring down) and there isn’t much reason to think that making the WPD immune to financial reality is going to make the City any safer.