Early this week, Springfield Police Commissioner Edward Flynn addressed a group of city-wide neighborhood leaders, people affiliated with beat management teams, civic associations, neighborhood councils, and community development corporations. Flynn had called the meeting in part to announce plans for the police department‘s restructuring.
Flynn opened with remarks reviewing the three key concepts he has repeated since taking the helm of the city police department: community-based, problem-oriented, and data-driven. He kept his address to under ten minutes, and then spent over an hour taking questions from the gathered residents. (In the coming weeks, Flynn will pay a visit to each beat management team around the city, starting next week, Wednesday, December 13, 7:00 pm, with Sector I at the Colonial Estates community room. This sector includes the entire Sixteen Acres neighborhood.)
"Real police work is connection to neighborhoods," Flynn said, "and dealing with, responding to and engaging with the neighborhoods’ priorities. The overarching challenge of the police department is to deal with crime, fear, and disorder in Springfield. All of those issues are connected to each other. Many of the activities that generate fear aren’t so much criminogenic as they are disorder-based. When people feel like they’ve lost control of their public spaces, they feel unsafe."
"And to the extent that thousands of people amend their behaviors, and stop making use of their public spaces," he continued, "we’ve created an aura of unsafety. The only people on the streets are predator and prey; it is unsafe."
"The safest neighborhoods," Flynn said, "are those with the most vibrant street life. If stores are open, pedestrians are on the sidewalk, people are driving around, and in the warm weather people are on their stoops talking to each other, you have a safe environment."
In contrast, Flynn said, if people are hiding behind locked doors, avoiding certain neighborhoods, and stores are closing early, and there is no night life, then neighborhoods "do become unsafe, because they’ve been abandoned." He added, "Informal social control is always the strongest guarantor of order and safety."
This was the basis for Flynn to introduce the police department restructuring, which takes the foundation of the former community policing unit—accountability—and distributes it throughout the entire department. "The overall strategy is to engage the entire department in the effort of being accountable for neighborhoods," he said. "That means every officer is going to get steadily assigned to an area of the city. Every sergeant in the patrol division is assigned to a steady geographic division; as are the lieutenants; as are the deputy chiefs."
"We want to work with neighborhoods to co-produce safety," he said. "We know we’ve gotta take the lead on gangs, guns and drugs, but when it comes to order maintenance, I believe we’ve gotta work with neighborhoods and identify priorities. One size doesn’t fit all, and we’ve gotta be in tune to that."
One of the aspects of the former community policing unit was the flexibility those officers had to adjust their hours in order to solve problems more effectively. In negotiating a new union contract, that language was extended to the entire department. "Any officer assigned to a geographic patrol division can, with their commanding officer’s approval, in response to a special problem, flex their hours," Flynn explained.
Residents, who may be legitimately concerned about "losing" their community policing officer, Flynn said, are "gaining a deputy chief, a lieutenant, and numerous officers assigned to your neighborhood."
This will change the face of community beat management team meetings, Flynn noted. At those meetings, his goal is to have a commanding officer in attendance, the one who "regularly answers calls for service in that neighborhood." Commanding officers, he said, can "grab the levers of the department and make things happen."
In the past, he said, when the community policing efforts were relegated to "just patrol officers, and the unit went from 70 to ten," officers had "a difficult time making the department respond to their requests. Now, when we have a community-based meeting, and an officer is there, [as well as] a lieutenant who’s responsible for the area, the lieutenant can tell the sergeant to work with the patrol officer" to make sure problems get solved. "That commanding officer, with one star, is responsible for crime and disorder conditions in that part of town. It’s their job to develop plans and procedures to deal with those issues," he added.
Along with controlling the violent crime in the city, which Flynn said his department has "a moral imperative" to address, he also highlighted the need for "order maintenance activities." He said, "We want to hold on to our middle class homeowners, and our stable renting community, and those people here who have made an investment in the community. We want to keep the stable people in those neighborhoods. They’re the anchors. We don’t want them to abandon ship, and that requires us to deal as judiciously and effectively as we can with order maintenance issues—[which] might not be the number one issue in some parts of town. In some parts of town it’s going to be the violent crime."
The best way to address the differences among the neighborhoods, Flynn said, "is to make sure that everybody who works [in a given] area of the city is on the same page with the organizational imperative, and what the command accountability network demands. That’s the purpose of this organization."
Flynn then reviewed the police department’s new organizational chart, highlighting a handful of changes that have been made, and then invited everyone in the room to introduce themselves. The whole city was more or less fairly well-represented, and personally, it was the first time I had witnessed anyone deliberately bring together participants in neighborhood organizations in a meeting just for them. These were the regular folks at the helm, and they are often all too invisible, collectively speaking.
The question-and-answer session opened with a query about hiring more police officers, to which Flynn replied that although the department was going to hire 16 people in January, and an additional 14 in May, the current hiring freeze prevents that. Later, while answering a similar question about how "maybe we need more Indians, and fewer chiefs," Flynn pointed out that the new deputy chiefs were promotions at no extra cost. "They can work as many overtime hours as they want, and earn no overtime pay," he said. (Flynn doesn’t earn overtime, either.)
Regarding the organizational chart, a question was asked about the placement of community police liaison Kathy Brown, highly regarded among neighborhood associations as responsive and very competent. Flynn’s chief of staff, Jennifer Flagg, responded that she pitched that Brown work directly with her, and so will be in the public information office. "She has been an underutilized resource," Flagg said, lauding Brown as a major asset to the city.
Below is a paraphrased sampling of the questions and answers Flynn addressed with the group, rearranged to a helpful reading order and, again, paraphrased.
Q: So the department has no more community policing units?
A: That’s right.
Will the community policing officers be the same?
We will likely assign officers to the same sectors they already worked in, but they may not have the same hours.
In the past we were told to call a community police phone number. But now, what number do we call to solve problems?
Use the phone number and email address of the police deputy chief for your division. Go to the top and they will delegate the officer to work on a solution. [North, which includes Brightwood, Memorial Square, Liberty Heights, East Springfield, Pine Point, Indian Orchard, and Boston Road: Deputy William Noonan, (413) 787-6886, wnoonan@springfieldpolice.net; Central, which includes Metro Center, South End, Six Corners, Hill-McKnight, Old Hill, Bay, and Upper Hill: Deputy William Cochrane, (413) 787-6340, wcochrane@springfieldpolice.net; South, which includes Forest Park, East Forest Park, and Sixteen Acres: Deputy William Fitchet, (413) 787-6330, wfitchet@springfieldpolice.net.]
Is the non-emergency police number still working? [(413) 787-6320]
Yes. And when you call the deputy chief’s number, you will get his voice mail.
Will you distribute police officers in different geographic areas? Our area is very dangerous and most officers wouldn’t want to patrol there. How will you avoid "punishing" offers by assigning them our district?
We want to develop teams for different neighborhoods and instill a sense of pride in the city for the officers. They will have ownership of that neighborhood where they are assigned. We need to work on that connection. If the red carpet hasn’t been rolled out when an officer arrives, if there has been a call, all the same, the officers need to know that somebody called you. The person who called might not want to stick their head out and wave hello because they don’t want to attract any trouble from the people they called about. The officers need to remember that someone wants them there.
When you go away, who’s in charge?
One of the deputy chiefs.
Who do we call when? What activity do we call 911 for? What do we call our deputy chief for? Can we have clear guidelines from the public information office on this?If it’s an urgent problem—someone is being beaten up, for example—you want to call the CAD office [911]. If it’s predictable, repetitive, and so on, you want to put it on the radar of the senior commander [call the deputy chief].
We often want the community police unit to handle quality-of-life problems. But what if we call about something like a barking dog, and a cruiser comes by later to check on it, and the dog is not barking at that moment? Will they blow off the problem?
Ideally, an officer will call you to follow up, and not just drive by. Remember, too, that the criminal system can’t solve every problem. We can issue a million tickets to a person with a barking dog, for example, and it still won’t make them deal with the problem appropriately. So this is at first a three-way communication among you, the police, and the problem party. Maybe the problem gets solved quickly that way, just with communication. If not, we invoke the necessary process. Our processes are currently overwhelmed, but officers can sometimes referee with the communications needed to problem-solve.
What are the real numbers of how many arrests each officer makes? How do those numbers compare to other communities? Is there an arrest avoidance among Springfield officers?
There are two challenges with that. One is arrest data itself. The other is that sometimes there is no need to arrest if a problem is solved some other way. Our summertime park and walks made a big difference. We have begun to focus on preventive activities.
What about the prima donna factor some officers have?
At an internal version of this meeting we are having now, the jealousy among officers became evident. Community policing units were regarded as having the easier job because they experienced the gratitude of citizens and they were more in touch with the feeling of solving problems. Folks were able to develop a kind of personal constituency in their work, and the rest of the department suffered along. The rewording of the contract has helped ameliorate that. We’ve been looking at the data, the funding, and fixing accountability. We need more people engaged in the process.
Do some officers think they are above quality-of-life issues?
The chain of command will help to fix that. The patrol officers’ job was often delegated to others. We must work on changing attitudes, which is a culmination of a culture that’s become very negative over the years.
How long before we know if this police department restructuring is going to work?
We’ll look at the numbers, the calls for service, and the citizen satisfaction levels. We are engaged with UMass to do a survey on citizen satisfaction. Once a year, we should be doing that, because the feeling of safety is just as important as the actual crime numbers. In an analysis of shootings, we found that 80 percent of the victims were in a gang, and/or had a weapon on them, and/or had a prior arrest or more, and/or were in the drug trade.
They’re killing each other, so we should be glad?
We have had crime analysts for only the past four months or so. There is a lot of crime out there bunched in groups of people. We must draw a distinction between the headlines in the news and what really may be going on. People reconcile what gets highlighted in the news with their own possibly unruly neighbors, and they make a direct association. We need to balance whether the numbers are going in the right direction versus the levels of perceived citizen safety. How safe do people feel living in their neighborhood? How safe do they feel in the city? So far citizen satisfaction is up ten percent, since we’ve been measuring it.
The Central District is geographically smaller than others, but it will get about 60 officers like the others. Why is that?
The Central District officers are necessarily more concentrated for that smaller, denser district.
We need better streetlights in the South End. All the way from State Street to the McDonald’s, the lights are low-wattage. This has come up at the neighborhood council meetings. Better lighting could decrease crime.
We will look into it.
You mentioned that false alarms for security systems have been a problem. Was there an ordinance of some kind passed to fine people for this?
Our work on that showed that the ordinance had no infrastructure. There was no system for fines and for appeals. Jennifer Flagg’s office is engaging with City Hall to see if they can invent a bureaucracy around that issue. In the last three months there has been a 20 percent reduction in false alarms. We’ll continue to look at the data and find the repeat offenders.
When perpetrators are found to be living in subsidized housing, aren’t they supposed to be evicted?
There are slight differences among what kind of subsidized housing falls in that category.
Regarding state police officers, can we try to get more money to hire more for local patrols?
Previously we hired state police under a special appropriation, which I was asked to organize. That money is now gone, and that particular squad left. But we have state police here all the time in the form of a state police gang task force. The state police details are still here. We’re not desperate for that patrol help.
Will you be replacing the current police station?
I can say that it is cleaner. We are trying to identify matching state bond funds for early next year to address that.
Will you implement professional development for officers?
In six months, we are sending people to development and leadership training. We are meeting with command staff once a week to work on it. Our summer deployment was very much a result of asking staff for the best plan. We saw a 20 percent decrease in crime over the summer. The question now is how do we institutionalize a community-based plan? Again, the staff itself developed it in large part. The leaders in the police department themselves were asking when the department could change over to geographic units.
One of our enemies is the newspaper. Why is it necessary for it to instill fear?
At a meeting of the private sector and public safety people, there was joking from business people in the surrounding towns about simply not telling the press about their criminal activity, and that’s how they deal with the newspaper. On the other hand we have been trying for transparency. We are working on a professional media strategy.
What can you do about repeat offenders?
The challenge goes beyond the judiciary. The county jail is at 120 percent capacity. The state prison is at 109 percent capacity. The chronic offenders cycle out of jail and are right back at the criminal activity. We want to work with other components of the system to concentrate on a finite number of repeat offenders. We can draw our attention to the ten percent who commit 50 percent of crimes, but we have to have our act together. One idea I want to implement is to make sure those repeat offenders are brought first to the 4:00 roll call, and have our own police officers there to greet them and be introduced. We could even have them escort the offender to their home, and welcome them back to their neighborhood and wish them all the best. This will reduce their anonymity, which is one of their main leveraging tools, because officers don’t know their faces. This way the cops will get to know them, as well as the conditions of their parole or probation, and it will probably have an effect on the repeat offender.
If I missed anything important, please feel free to comment here.
