ADD POLICE? CRUNCH THE NUMBERS

New police have become chips in the high-stakes poker game that is the
race for mayor.

Michael Nutter and Dwight Evans say we need 500 more men and women in
blue. Tom Knox has seen their bet and raised it. He wants 1,000. So
does Bob Brady. The big guy will hire another 1,000 police and
probation and parole officers - if elected.

There's a cost to this, of course, but what's a few million when the
citizens are clamoring for the next mayor to do something - anything -
about crime? It's the issue that tops the charts in all the polls,
hence the bidding war among mayoral wannabes.

But, before we put those cops on the street, let's do a reality check
and consider Newton's Third Law. (That's Isaac, not Wayne.)

That law states that for every action there is an equal and opposite
reaction.

Hire and train new police and send them onto the streets and they will
do what cops do: pinch bad guys.

But the arrest is only the beginning of game. You've got your
preliminary hearing. You've got your trial. If convicted, you must
serve a prison sentence. Once that is done, you have a probationary
period, under the supervision of the courts.

The bare-bones cost of an anticrime initiative that puts 1,000 cops on
the street is easy to figure out.

In salary and benefits, a rookie costs $60,000 a year. After four
years, though, those costs rise to close to $80,000 per officer,
including salary, benefits and overtime.

To put 1,000 more officers on the streets will cost $60 million today
and up to $80 million a year down the road.

And how much does it cost to move the perps through the justice system
and find a place for them in prison?

A lot.

For one thing, we will need a new jail. Philadelphia's prisons are
above capacity, with about 8,700 prisoners present as of Thursday in a
system designed to hold 7,000.

If the arrests made by those new cops result in just 2,000 more perps
going to the city jails each year, the city will have no choice but to
build a new prison. Estimated construction cost: $70 million.

Cost of housing those prisoners for one year in that new facility
would be about $64 million - according to the $88 per day the city
says it costs to house, feed and guard an inmate.

The cost of new probation and parole officers to handle the increased
case load would be about $7 million a year.

The cost of adding new judges, staff and courtrooms to handle the
influx? About $10 million a year.

A million here, a million there and pretty soon it begins to add
up.

The way I add it up, for every dollar spent on a police officer, you
incur an additional $1 in costs elsewhere in the system, not including
the cost of building a new prison.

Like Newton said, for every action, an opposite and equal
reaction.

There is one politician who thinks a police buildup is the wrong way
to go, and his name is John Street. If policing is a "hard" solution
to crime, Street favors a "soft" one, efforts focused on prevention,
such as better after-school programs and job counseling for ex-cons.

In a visit to The Inquirer Editorial Board the other week, the mayor
did a riff in favor of his anticrime measures and against the
hire-more-police ideas advocated by his would-be successors.

Street has a plan to use state money to hire 200 more cops, but he's
against anything more than that.

His exact words: "I am unwilling to pay for an additional 500 police
officers, because I know the costs you will have to pay. I am
unwilling to have new prison beds... . I am unwilling to incur costs
of defense attorneys and prosecutors because I don't believe we will
get an adequate return on that. I would rather put the money in the
front-end programs that are designed to deal with the root causes of
the problem. If I go out and build prison beds, I am throwing in the
towel on prevention efforts."

For the record, in 2005 - the last year complete data are available -
the city made 19,000 arrests for serious felonies (murder, rape,
robbery, etc.); an additional 35,000 for misdemeanors (gambling, drug
offenses, assaults, etc.); and an additional 38,000 arrests or
citations for what are called quality-of-life crimes (vandalism,
curfew violations, vagrancy, etc.).

It adds up to 92,000 arrests or citations in one year. Add 1,000
officers and that total could easily rise to 115,000.

Will that solve the crime problem? One official says
no.

"Traditional policing is not working," he said. "We locked up 74,000
people last year. We confiscated 6,000 guns and $140 million worth of
drugs. If we put another 1,000 police officers out there, we're just
going to make more arrests."

Wonder who said this? It was Police Commissioner Sylvester
Johnson.

I never thought I'd live to see a police commissioner who doesn't want
more police.