COMMUNITY POLICING MOVES ON

St. Petersburg's Police Chief Moves His Officers To More Traditional
Assignments

ST. PETERSBURG - Mildred Reece sees them more often now, the young men
hanging on the street corners and in the doorways around Childs Park.

They have returned to reclaim the neighborhood. They're back, Reece says,
to sell drugs. "They know when it's safe."

Across town in Harbordale, Theresa McEachern watches mobs of teens gather
in the street - just like they used to. In one recent week, seven cars were
burglarized.

And in Historic Uptown, Ingrid Comberg fears years of progress chasing off
prostitutes have been squandered. "It's at an all-time high," she said.

"You tell them, "You're not welcome in our neighborhood' and they say,
"What are you going to do about it?' They feel safe here."

Angered by such festering problems, some of St. Petersburg's community
leaders blame a weakened community policing effort.

Once heralded as a back-to-basics cure for the city's woes, the program has
been quietly scaled back in recent years. It now more closely resembles
efforts of police in Tampa and Clearwater and the Pinellas County Sheriff's
Office, which seek to balance the experimental and standard approaches to
law enforcement.

In St. Petersburg, some of the deepest cuts have come this year under
police Chief Chuck Harmon. Increasingly, the city's 43 community policing
officers have been pulled from their neighborhoods for special assignments
or additional duties, such as responding to 911 calls. They are being used
for downtown's First Friday celebration and at BayWalk.

The result, critics say, is a disconnect between the department's stated
commitment to community policing and reality.

"It's been completely watered down," Comberg said. "It's not fair to the
officers and it's not fair to the neighborhood."

Comberg was around in 1991 when then-Chief Curt Curtsinger introduced
community policing to St. Petersburg, taking a cue from other cities. The
idea was straightforward. Officers would immerse themselves in a
neighborhood and learn the "who, what and why," Curtsinger said at the
time. "Rather than just fighting the small percentage of the "bad guys,'
the police will work with the larger percentage of the "good guys."'

Community policing follows the so-called broken window theory, that fixing
small problems prevents larger ones. If the windows are not repaired,
vandals might break others, go inside and perhaps start fires or sell drugs.

The concept spread rapidly across the nation in the past 20 years and
remains popular. But in some areas it has seen setbacks, mostly for
financial reasons. The Clinton administration's COPS program, which added
100,000 officers to the streets, has been phased out, leaving local
departments to trim staff. Homeland Security grants available now more
often focus on equipment.

Grant restraints led Tampa to dismantle its community policing program in
2003, giving rise to complaints similar to those heard now in St.
Petersburg. When new Chief Steve Hogue started, he instructed all officers
to incorporate the problem-solving philosophy into their daily work as
opposed to having a separate unit like St. Petersburg's.

Harmon is not the first to tweak the community policing effort here, but
some of the biggest changes have come under him. Earlier this year, Harmon
mandated that community policing officers conduct two narcotics operations,
two prostitution operations and two traffic details per month - a total of
at least 48 hours per month. Traffic enforcement is done in a neighborhood,
but drug and prostitution details can take officers away, as does downtown
and other commitments.

Harmon cited two primary reasons for the changes. --In the more than three
years he has been chief, he said, the major issues cited by residents are
prostitution, drugs and traffic, problems that transcend individual
neighborhoods. "It's my responsibility to the city as a whole." --He also
wanted more accountability. "I wasn't convinced that some people assigned
to community policing areas were working to their capacity," he said.

Harmon acknowledges the bond community leaders have with their officers but
contends the "vast majority" of city residents are not that involved.

"Their judgment of the Police Department," he said, "is when they pick up
the phone and dial 911."

Crime statistics also call into question the effectiveness of community
policing. While the overall crime rate in St. Petersburg dropped since 1991
- - following a national trend as the crack cocaine epidemic waned - it has
leveled off in the past five years.

Still, critics say Harmon is overlooking the real reason for the change: a
shortage of officers. The department has struggled with recruits who quit
during initial training or officers who leave for other agencies. There are
now 16 vacancies in the 540-member department. The retention struggle has
raised complex questions about management style, workplace environment and
benefits.

"That's the elephant in the corner that nobody wants to talk about," said
Karl Nurse, head of the Council of Neighborhood Associations, or CONA.

CONA has made community policing a top priority and pressed the City
Council to add three new officers. On Thursday, however, the council passed
a budget with no new spending.

Steve Plice, a CONA leader who lives in Jungle Terrace, has witnessed the
diversion of resources firsthand. Earlier this summer, the community
policing officer in his neighborhood was temporarily assigned as a patrol
sergeant. That's still the case. Another officer is supposed to fill in,
but Plice said the officer has his own area to cover. "We don't bother
calling him because it's a waste of time," Plice said. "We know we're not
going to get a response."

It's not an uncommon sentiment, yet critics almost universally blame the
policymakers, not the officers.

Rank-and-file officers are reticent to discuss the situation. But Roy
Olson, a 25-year veteran who retired last month, said many feel distracted
by the new responsibilities. "If I've got a rapist in my area and I'm
trying to catch him," he said, "why should I sit at a stop sign with a
radar gun and write ticket after ticket?"

Another problem, Olson said, is the reliance on community policing officers
for emergency calls. "The concept is if you're not busy and hear a 911
call, you can take it," Olson said. "If you have downtime, you don't mind
helping out. But if you take one, dispatchers start shifting more calls to
you. There were days I spent my whole eight-hour shift taking (911) calls."

Sgt. Phil Quandt was among the original community policing officers in 1991
and said the freedom Curtsinger granted paid dividends. Quandt, speaking as
a union representative, recalled spending a night on a boat with another
officer to crack a string of burglaries in the harbor.

Now, Quandt said, "You're telling people you've got complete and total
flexibility. However, if that comes up or this comes up ... plus you've got
to do this and that ... how much flexibility do you really have?"

St. Petersburg is not alone in modifying community policing. As federal
funding has dried up and local budgets tightened, departments look for ways
to stretch staff, said Jack McDevitt, associate dean in the college of
criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston.

Officials are also trying to revisit the scope of such programs to see
where they work and where they don't. "It's pretty much accepted that this
is a better way to do business, but there's still a lot of discussion about
what it is exactly that makes a program successful," McDevitt said.

In that sense, then, Harmon's actions match the national trend. He said he
still believes in the approach but feels community policing was oversold in
St. Petersburg and elsewhere when introduced in the early 1990s.

"People thought it was going to solve a lot more than it's actually done,"
the chief said. "But we're not going to be able to solve all problems."

Harmon said he may consider other changes, including incorporating patrol
officers through community policing to assuage bad feelings. "It's going to
continue to evolve," he said.

But some feel the philosophical battle has tipped in favor of more
traditional policing and may be hard to overcome. "The community policing
strategy seems to be losing," said Nurse, the neighborhood association
president. "It seems to be getting more and more lip service and less
resources. And then, of course, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."