LongBeachReport.com | LBReport.com | Council Should Stop Nagging Police Chief About Police Levels & Start Restoring Officers It Cut

(Aug. 31, 2010) -- Some Councilmembers are displeased that LB Police Chief Jim McDonnell won't give them an exact figure on how many police they should budget.

Chief McDonnell has said he'll do the best he can with what the Council gives him but he won't cite a specific number.

We have no problem with this. It's not the Police Chief's job to provide Councilmembers with political cover. It's the Council's job to decide how many police to budget for taxpayers.

Over the years, multiple Police Chiefs have told LB Councilmembers what needs to be done; Councilmembers simply haven't done it.

In 1994, then LBPD Chief Bill Ellis helped produce a City Hall issued "LBPD Strategic Plan" that included a preliminary staffing strategy with modest annual officer increases to reach 1,023 sworn officers in FY2000. That was nearly eleven years ago...and LB taxpayers never received that officer level in any year, in good economic times or bad.

In 2003, Police Chief Anthony Batts said LBPD needed to grow and gave the Council numerical options. Councilmembers shrugged and budgeted mainly minimal increases.

In 2008, the Council cut the Police Athletic League, a program Chief Batts had touted as prevention instead of just enforcement.

In early 2009, Chief Batts said city management was planning deep police cuts that could detrimentally impact Long Beach. Councilmembers shrugged.

In summer 2009 (a few months after Chief Batts announced he was leaving LB for Oakland), LB city management proposed cutting 88 officers. In September 2009, the Council respoonded by cutting 76 officers.

In the next two weeks, the City Council is scheduled to vote on the latest proposal by City Manager West, advanced without dissent by Mayor Foster. That proposal would have the City Council cut 27 more sworn officer positions (four civilianized) if city employee unions agree to modify contracts City Hall negotiated with them (that the unions modified last year that City Hall wants modified again by September 15)...and if unions don't agree to this, West and Foster propose that the Council cut 49 more sworn officer positions on top of the 27 they're already proposing to cut.

That would leave leave LB taxpayer with (best case) roughly 100 fewer budgeted officers than last year (76 + 27 = 103) or worst case ("Plan B") with roughly 150 fewer budgeted officers (103 + 49 = 152).

That would leave Long Beach with a per capita budgeted officer level for citywide deployment roughly equivalent to cutting L.A.P.D's level by approximately 25% (and we think closer to 30%).

At one point, the City Council budgeted 1,020 total officers but that included nearly 60 officers who weren't available for citywide neighborhood deployment because they're contracted to handle tasks at the Port/Airport/LBCC/LBUSD, paid by those entities and not by the Council's General Fund.

At its maximum, LB's neighborood/citywide police level budgeted by the Council's General Fund barely reached 960, which was thinned by City Hall's failure to provide a replenishment police academy class to replace retiring/exiting officers, then slashed by the Council in Sept. 09 by 76 budgeted sworn officer positions and now thinned further by over two dozen sworn officer positions budgeted on paper left unfilled on the street.

That is the level from which LB city management and the Mayor now propose that the Council cut police further. By our rough reckoning, that would leave LB below 850 officers and headed toward 810. These were the types of police levels that LB City Hall itself acknowledged over a decade and a half ago should be increased...and that was at a time when LB was smaller and gangs were less entrenched.

As reported in April by LBReport.com, the Rand Corporation recently issued a study showing the relationship between adding police and reducing crime...and L.A.'s Police Chief, Charlie Beck, cited the Rand study publicly in testimony at an L.A. City Council committee meeting:

LAPD Chief Beck: ...The size of the Police Department is critical. I know that 1%, or slightly less than 1%, doesn't sound like much, but if you believe the RAND study, the current RAND study, done by the best economic experts in this state or and maybe in this country, a 1% reduction in the size of a police department equates to a 1% increase in the homicide rate. It equates to a .5[%] increase in robbery rates. I can give you the exact numbers [cites them for L.A.] This is just based on a 1% cut. This is what I do for a living, and you all confirmed me because you know I'm an expert in this and these are my projections.

The RAND study states in key section:

How Much Do Additional Police Reduce Crime?

As we did earlier, we combine results from several studies to develop estimates of the expected decrease in crime that would occur if we increase the police force by 1 percent in a typical department. Table 4 reports the effect estimates by crime category for the multiple published studies...

Heaton, RAND Study, Hidden in Plain Sight, p. 11

Although effect estimates vary from study to study, the general message is that, once the identification problem is adequately addressed, increases in police staffing levels do generate measurable decreases in crime. The final column (bolded and shaded) combines information across studies by averaging the effects estimates using a process known as metaanalysis. [footnote omitted] In our cost/benefit calculations, we use the combined impact estimates as our baseline measures of the effects of police on crime. For example, the 0.927 combined impact reported for homicide means that, in a typical department, we expect that a 1-percent increase in the number of sworn officers would decrease the number of homicides in that department’s patrol area by 0.927 percent. Although the combined impact is negative for rape and larceny, these values are not statistically significantly different from zero. Given that we cannot confidently claim from existing studies that adding police will have a nonzero effect on rape and larceny, we further adopt the conservative assumption that police have no impact on rates of rape or larceny when we do our cost/benefit analyses [later in the study].

When evaluating specific policy proposals, it is important to remember that these statistical estimates of the effectiveness of police are designed to assess the effects of modest variations in police force size while holding other social factors constant at their observed levels. This means that these estimates are most useful for projecting the effects of small to modest changes in the number of police and may be less informative about large changes in force size, such as a 50-percent decrease in the number of officers.

Moreover, the applicability of these estimates to any particular city will depend on the similarity between that city and those examined in these studies. Evans and Owens (2007) and Levitt (1997, 2002) focus on a broad cross-section of large to medium-sized U.S. cities and thus are likely to capture effects for a typical U.S. city. The other studies focus on particular large metropolitan departments. Because we lack credible city-specific estimates of the effectiveness of police, in order to do cost/benefit calculations, we must generically apply these estimates to specific cities. Yet, clearly, in actuality, there will be variation across cities in police effectiveness.

******** In a general sense, the cost/benefit calculus depends on the distribution of crimes within a particular city and the expected cost of hiring more police.

Localities with smaller police forces or lower costs per officer will tend to fare better in these calculations because they can achieve a given percentage change in force size with lower expenditures. Policing investment in cities with large numbers of high-cost crimes, such as homicide, will also appear better because there are significant gains from crime reduction in such settings...

Subject to the caveats noted previously about the generalizability of the cost and effectiveness estimates, the approach illustrated in the two examples can be applied to any locality for which there are available data on crime counts, current police staffing levels, and the cost of hiring or separating additional officers...

Yes, LB Councilmembers have been told much about police levels; it's just that some haven't wanted to hear it.