Cities cutting police work

The trend continued in Boston yesterday, where Commissioner Edward F. Davis announced that 40 cadets and 20 civilian employees will be laid off July 1. The department could also disband its horse and bicycle units to help close a $20 million budget gap in the next fiscal year.

The law-enforcement budget cuts will be most acute in the state's working-class and formerly industrial cities, communities such as New Bedford, Fall River, and Brockton, which rely most heavily on state aid to provide basic services. Facing an ever-growing budget deficit this fiscal year and next, Governor Deval Patrick has slashed local aid and called for eliminating a grant program that funds extra officers, programs, and equipment to enhance community policing.

"This is the reality of what we're facing," said A. Wayne Sampson, a former Shrewsbury chief who serves as executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association. "Most of our outreach programs are going to be eliminated just by the sheer lack of personnel to do them."

As a result of the strain, Worcester has just ended a popular foot patrol in its central business district. In Lynn, school resource officers were wiped out. And in New Bedford, the department dropped its gang unit, trimmed detectives from special investigation teams, and cut an entire division focused on building neighborhood connections, all to send experienced personnel back to cruisers after the newest officers were laid off.

New Bedford even called two canine officers back to patrol duty, forcing their highly trained dogs into early retirement.

There is little way to put a positive spin on it, Mayor Scott W. Lang said.

"The first purpose of government should be to keep our citizens safe and our kids educated," said Lang, who has asked Beacon Hill officials to provide more money to communities such as his to prevent police layoffs. "That's something right now that I think we're really putting a tremendous stress and test on."

Several cities, including Boston, Worcester, and New Bedford, have sought wage or benefit concessions to avoid layoffs, but unions have been reluctant to agree without a guarantee that all jobs will be protected.

That is a pledge that officials have been unable to make, given the steep decline in local revenues in recent months, combined with the deep cuts in state aid. Patrick made an immediate $128 million reduction to municipal aid earlier this year and has proposed deepening the cut to as much as $375 million for fiscal 2010, which starts July 1. He also reduced a $21.3 million grant for community policing by $5.1 million and called for eliminating it altogether next year.

Law-enforcement budget cuts would not affect police details at utility and road construction sites, an expensive practice that Patrick has sought to rein in, but which remains in place through local ordinances. Although taxpayers do not fund those overtime details directly, they pay for it in other ways, such as costs passed on through utility rates. Police have lobbied for keeping the details to enhance their visibility in the streets without straining municipal budgets.

The initial layoffs in New Bedford and elsewhere could be a preview for other cities. This week, Fall River laid off 53 police officers. Dozens of police jobs are on the table in Brockton.

Layoffs are expected across the state this spring and summer, as larger and needier communities come to terms with the economic crisis.

In Boston yesterday, Davis met with his command staff to announce the budget cuts, which he hopes can minimize the number of uniformed police layoffs.

"You can't deny that this is an across-the-board emergency that is affecting every sector of the public and private communities," Davis said.

The federal stimulus package, union concessions, and tax increases could dampen statewide law-enforcement cuts, but significant service reductions seem unavoidable.

"Over the course of time, police departments will be cut to staffing levels not seen in our lifetime," said James Machado, executive director of the Massachusetts Police Association, which represents officers across the state.

Already those reductions are prompting departments to reassign specialty and community divisions to cruisers, shifting from preventive to reactive police work.

The redeployments represent a basic "change in the way we do business," said Machado, a Fall River police sergeant.

Officials in multiple cities said they will try not to let response times for emergencies increase.

Other police work will necessarily suffer. That may mean slower investigations, with fewer detectives available. Waiting time could stretch for nonemergency calls, everything from car accidents without injuries to break-ins and robberies in which a perpetrator has already fled, officials and law-enforcement specialists said.

And departments could recede from community policing initiatives that many officials and residents have celebrated and endorsed in the last two decades, the relationship-building work with residents, business owners, and public-school students to boost neighborhoods and crack down on small crimes as a means to prevent larger ones.

Those initiatives were born out of the "broken windows" theory first espoused by criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article. They were applied prominently by Boston's William J. Bratton here, in New York, and in Los Angeles, where Bratton currently serves as chief.

In an interview yesterday, Kelling said it would be a mistake for cash-strapped departments to automatically reassign remaining employees to cruiser duty and 911 response.

"The tendency of police departments confronted with limited personnel is to focus on more serious offenses, and we know from New York City that concentrating and focusing on minor offenses is probably more important, because it gives you access to criminals," said Kelling, a professor at Rutgers University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Instead, he said, departments should conserve resources by spending less time responding to 911 calls, many of which are nonemergency, such as minor traffic accidents and break-ins that could be handled over the phone. Meanwhile, all officers in cruisers or otherwise, not just in special units, should be applying community policing philosophies, he said.

"Any retreat from preventive modes, I think, is more dangerous to communities than an after-the-fact response," Kelling said.