Cost-cutters turn focus to police
Chief explains staffing, duties
Brookline's fire chief had the uncomfortable task of detailing the need for every discretionary dollar in his department budget earlier last month. And then the Efficiency Initiative Committee's six-person group focusing on public safety turned its attention to Police Department operations, with Chief Daniel O'Leary.
During the Sept. 25 session with O'Leary, the subcommittee's members repeatedly asked about deployment, job duties, staffing, and paid details as they looked for areas that might be trimmed in coming years.
"How much is enough?" asked Selectman Richard Benka, a committee member, about the number of police officers.
Public safety is just one of the areas being explored by the Efficiency Initiative Committee, which was appointed by selectmen in May to look for cost savings after residents approved a $6.2 million property-tax increase. The 10-member panel also has subcommittees looking at privatization and consolidations. The schools are also looking to trim costs.
O'Leary presented data showing that Boston has far more officers per square mile, as well as per 1,000 residents, but that Brookline enjoys much safer streets. The worst crimes - rape, murder, robbery, assault, burglary, and larceny - have declined over the last decade, he said, while the department's staffing has remained fairly static at 108 patrol officers.
More of them are on the street, however. As part of the department's 2002 move into a shared public safety facility, the system for handling police, fire, and ambulance calls was combined in a single dispatch center and the job was turned over to civilian personnel. This freed up six police officers, and O'Leary put three of them in traffic. He used the other three to create an intelligence position, with a detective tracking crime statistics within Brookline and regionally; a crime-scene analyst, who can process the information within hours rather than the months required if federal or state assistance is used; and a house officer, who covers the front desk at the public safety building.
A combined dispatch center staffed by civilians is "unique in this part of the country," O'Leary said. Another efficiency from 2005 is the combined business office for police and fire, he said.
Being able to deploy all 108 officers, the chief said, gives him the flexibility to flood an area hit by a crime spree, such as a rash of house breaks early last year, or to increase coverage on weekend nights in September, when Freeman Street, which now has several apartments of Boston University students, generates a high number of noise and illegal parking complaints.
In North Brookline, O'Leary said, crime mirrored that of nearby Boston, although the rates within a mile of Brookline's borders with Boston were six times as high for violent crimes and five times as high for property crimes. (Comparable Newton statistics were unavailable.)
South Brookline enjoys a more suburban profile. Most complaints there concern either traffic or larcenies from vehicles, and those are mostly thefts of visible electronics, including the popular portable GPS devices, he said.
In the era of Proposition 2 1/2's limits on property taxes, having a traffic division is fairly unusual, O'Leary said. Many towns in Massachusetts have eliminated the division as budgets dwindled, he said. Brookline has a few other areas that are unique, he said, including such community-service functions as walking patrols of Housing Authority properties, youth officers, a graffiti specialist, and specialists in the needs of and crimes against seniors.
The subcommittee asked about the town's practice of sending police and fire units as well as an ambulance to medical emergencies.
O'Leary noted that there are more police on the streets, so his officers are regularly first on the scene. Most are not trained EMTs, but do have defibrillator and CPR training and may be able to stabilize someone in crisis.
"When the Fire Department or the EMTs arrive, we relinquish the situation," he said. Since fire personnel aim to arrive within four minutes of a call, police are not often called upon to do more than start getting a situation under control, he said.
Another area explored were paid details, in which the town hires police officers to direct traffic around construction jobs. According to O'Leary's figures, the budget for the details is nearly $3 million annually.
The chief said the town's bylaws give him the authority to decide whether there is a public safety issue that warrants assigning a detail. He said he believes civilian flaggers would not be an adequate replacement for his officers, in part because they lack the authority to countermand traffic signals to move or stop traffic, in part because having more police on the streets makes Brookline safer - even on details, officers are required to respond to nearby emergencies - and because the job of police officer, which pays between $40,000 and $50,000 annually, is more attractive if detail work, which pays a flat $40 an hour with no overtime, is also available. O'Leary also noted that the civilian rate is $37.50 an hour, minimizing any savings to the town.
Asked what other department positions he'd like to make civilian, O'Leary pointed to his crime analyst and information technology personnel; position changes would have to be negotiated with the union. 