Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 4020 AMERICAN POLICE BEAT: MARCH 2017 How many cops do we need now? E veryone knows the Houston PD, like s many other agen- cies, needs more cops. The question is: how many? Chief Art Acevedo and Mayor Sylvester Turner agree that the city needs more officers. “I said early on we needed about another five or six hundred and we still need about another five to six hundred,” Turner said when asked about this topic after a recent meeting of the Hous- ton City Council. Houston has roughly 5,200 officers at the moment and Turner says he’d like to see another 540 by 2020. Acevedo says that’s a good goal. But in a perfect world, without budget crunches, the pension crisis and other issues, some say 6,000 cops for a city the size of Houston doesn’t cut it. Larry Hoover runs the Police Research Center at the Sam Houston State Uni- versity. He’s studied staffing levels at the Houston PD and says the way to go is to define goals like lower response times and then hire enough officers to achieve those goals. Hoover says Houston should try and get response times down to less than five minutes. “To reach what I would deem to be reasonable per- formance levels would re- quire 1,174 additional sworn officers,” Hoover told Hous- ton Public Media notes. That figure is close to what former Chief Charles Mc- Clelland recommended in a 2014 report about staffing improvements. Hoover also discussed how Houston lines up with the Chicago PD. Chicago is the third largest city in the country and Houston is the fourth. The Chicago PD has only about a half a million more residents than Houston does and currently has 12,400 patrol officers. That’s more than twice the number of cops in Houston. But Hoover correctly points out that this is an “apples and oranges” comparison because Chicago’s so dense and Houston is so spread out. We need more cops in places like Houston, but who pays the tab? Crime is either at historic lows or wildly out of control. It all depends on who you ask. And as readers of American Police Beat know, the vast majority of people believe crime is going up when it’s actually going down. Back in the 1990’s, Penn- sylvania was building pris- ons left and right as federal and state inmate populations quadrupled between 1980 and 2000. But with exception of spikes in homicide and other major crimes in cities like Chicago and Baltimore, crime across all categories is at historically low levels. Like many states, Penn- sylvania is finding out that they might have built a few too many lockups. “This is the new normal for state corrections,” Cor- rections Secretary John Wet- zel told the Post-Gazette in a recent interview. Officials are expected to close two of the state’s 26 prisons in 2017. State officials say the clos- ings could save the state as much as $160 million at a time when that money is desperately needed. Pennsylvania faces a bud- get shortfall of about $1.5 billion. Legislators repre- senting areas where there are a lot of corrections of- ficers and their unions obvi- ously oppose the plan. But some say the tough- on-crime spending boom associated with the 1980’s and 90’s was never going to last forever. “That was not a sustainable or successful criminal justice system,” said Sen. Stewart Greenleaf (R-Montgomery), the com- mittee chair. His Democratic counterpart, Sen. Daylin Leach (D-Montgomery), said prison should be re- served for people who are a danger to themselves or others. “I’m glad we’re closing two prisons,” Leach said. “I look forward to the day when we can close 10 more.” Prison construction boom in 90’s means more jails empty For close to two decades, Americans have been told by the federal government and law enforcement au- thorities: “if you see some- thing, say something.” If you take the subway or a bus to work, you will notice that most of the walls are plastered with “see some- thing say something” post- ers. Initially the motto was rejected because it’s so vague. People at DOJ, DHS and even the State Dept. cor- rectly pointed out that it would likely result in little old ladies calling in suspi- cious Muslims that turned out to be the UPS guy. But DHS eventually picked up “see something, say something” and ran with it. So the question is this: Was this just some feel-good nonsense or did it produce anything in the way of re- sults? Government Executive Magazine recently had a nice round-up of the conclu- sions of the people trying to answer that question. “New York magazine writer Dwyer Gunn, citing the work of NYU sociolo- gist Harvey Molotch, points to the detrimental effect of many “leads that are likely to amount to nothing.” For one thing, they make each individual lead less likely to be taken seriously. Over- all, he notes, the program “hasn’t yielded any terror- ists.” In 2008, the New York Times noted that the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) claimed it got 1,944 campaign-related tips in 2006. The result? “No terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.” TechDirt.com called the campaign the creation of a “Massive Database Of Useless Info From Citizens Spying On Each Other.” There’s a valuable PR lesson here for local law en- forcement in terms of public approval. Last year Gallup discov- ered that, despite the whole war-on-cops thing, 76% of Americans have “a great deal of respect for the po- lice.” That might be related to the fact that cops do their jobs and don’t necessarily rely on civilians to get the ball rolling. Compare the police ap- proval rating above to these: Only 7% of Americans asked have “a great deal of trust and confidence” in those “who either hold or are running for public of- fice.” Only 22% had “a great deal of trust and confidence” in the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches of government combined and just 8% had “a great deal of trust and confidence” in the federal government's handling of domestic prob- lems; 11% said the same of international problems. I just saw one bad lookin’ dude at Target! Sometimes it’s obvious that the people who designed the ads don’t actually take the subway.