Merger backers launch drive to consolidate police departments Better Together -- the Wells Fargo Bank-backed group established to promote a proposed merger of the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County – is launching an effort to consolidate the regions law enforcement agencies, according to the Nov. 15 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Given traditionally high crime rates in the City of St. Louis – which has a large, highly centralized police department – and traditionally low crime rates in St. Louis County municipalities – with their smaller, community-oriented police departments – the move is likely to be highly controversial. The pro-merger group announced Nov. 13 that it has contracted with a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy known as the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) for a $300,000 study on “how the city and county should be policed,” according to the newspaper. PERF is expected to issue a proposal for restructuring of the regions law enforcement resources in about six month. Sunshine Law requests have already been submitted to roughly 60 St. Louis County Police Departments for detailed information on hiring, budgets and operations, according to the newspaper. PERF has been charged with determining the “ideal” number of police departments for the St. Louis region, according to the newspaper. “Would it be one department? Five departments? We are going to go out out a limb an say it wouldnt be 60, ” Nancy Rice, a political consultant with Pelopidas, LLC, who serves as Better Togethers executive director, told the Post-Dispatch. However, crime statistics and many local police officers might suggest Rice is wrong. Although it has the largest police department in the area, the City of St. Louis has consistently had some of highest crime rates in the nation. Earlier this year, police chiefs from around the nation took the unusual step of gathering here to help plot a strategy to curb chronically high crime rates in the City of St. Louis and Kansas City. The meeting came after the government of France officially warned its citizens that travel to much of the City of St. Louis was unsafe. For decades, city police officials have acknowledged that 911 calls routinely go unanswered during period of peak demand. Should calls to the police emergency line be answered, operators commonly inform citizens that no officers are available to respond. St. Louis County municipalities, in contrast, are generally considered to be among the lowest in the nation, with many departments formally accredited by internationally recognized law enforcement organizations. The City of St. Louis and most St. Louis County municipalities have had in place since the 1990s formal Community Oriented Policing programs to encourage good relations between police and citizens. Proponents say such grassroots initiatives have been successful in reducing crime through greater citizen participation, helping police provide service better tailored to the needs of local residents, and fostering an atmosphere in which problems can be resolved without unwarranted enforcement. Lack of an effective community oriented policing initiative has been widely cited as a factor in the recent unrest in Ferguson. However, questionable management practices in St. Louis have helped to undermine crime prevention efforts in that city. St. Louis police officers have for decades widely blamed inadequate funding which has left the department understaffed and its patrolling officers under-paid and under-trained. For decades the department has remained below authorized staffing levels. Due to low pay, St. Louis has long been known as “revolving door” department, which officers leave for higher-paying departments, often within a year of completing city-provided police academy instruction. Veteran St. Louis police officers commonly say a consolidation of St. Louis Police operations from neighborhood precincts into three “super-stations,” during the administration of St. Louis Mayor Vincent Schoemehl, made the situation worse. The consolidation, engineered in part by Rice who was then a member of Schoehmehls staff, resulted booking backlogs and increased travel times for routine station business. That meant less time spent patrolling and assisting citizens, police officers complain. The Post-Dispatch report links Better Togethers bid for law enforcement consolidation to a recent increase in crime around the region, dubbed the “Ferguson Effect,” which the newspaper says has resulted from a combination of emboldened criminals and manpower shortages experienced in St. Louis as city officers were deployed to protest sites in North County. However, Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics, widely reported in the Post-Dispatch and other local news media, confirm that high crime rates have been a problem in the city and some sections of St. Louis County for decades – and have in fact been leveling off, Not addressed in the either the Post-Dispatch coverage or on the Better Together website (which makes no mention of the “announcement” of the police consolidation study) are the hundred of millions of dollars held in police pension funds around the area. Fear that city officials would tap into pension funds prompted St. Louis police to formally oppose local control of their department for decades. Control of the department was returned to city officials in a controversial move by Missouri legislators in 2013. Rice and Pelopidas, LLC, led the citys lobbying effort for control of the police department.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 16:53:34 +0000
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