City: What specific steps will you take within the police
department to reduce crime?
           Mains: Step one, have an exceptional
chief of police. I’m liking a lot of what Cedric’s
doing [new Police Chief Cedric Alexander]. I’m not prepared to say absolutely
I’d keep him at this point, because I want to have a chance to collect more
data. But everything I have heard within the department suggests that he is
doing an exceptional job in restoring confidence and building morale. And he’s
redeployed in a number of places — made some management changes that I agree
with. The key, number one, is leadership and having
the right person as chief.
           Number two:
Whoever is my chief will understand that I expect if we fund 630 officers that
we have 630 officers. So we’ll keep our recruitment active enough and we’ll
have people in the pipeline so we don’t have the vacancy problem we have today.
           Number
three, I will restore community policing by ensuring beat integrity, ensuring
that officers assigned to beats will work those beats on a regular basis, so
that they’re familiar with the neighborhood and the territory, and the people
in the neighborhood are familiar with them. And in certain neighborhoods,
expanding that beat where possible so that there’s the opportunity to have them
out of their cars on bikes, on horseback, on foot in some instances, where
appropriate, in focused areas.
           The fourth
thing is related to that. In order to be able to keep the same cops in the same
neighborhoods, keeping their regular beats: one of the things that’s pulling
them off of that right now is that they’re having to race to high-volume calls.
There are certain issues that generate more calls than others. I want to have
interdiction teams specifically assigned citywide, teams that don’t have a
beat, that will deal with drugs, that will deal with prostitution,
that will deal with stolen autos. Those are particular problems that
often absorb a whole lot of people’s time.
           Those will
be mobile teams that are able to cross lines and back up folks so that you’ve
got a concentrated attack force ready to deal with those issues. That should
hopefully reduce the pressure on folks working the beats.
What steps would you
take in other areas to reduce crime?
           The number
one issue is the concentration of poverty. Reducing the concentration of
poverty and breaking the cycle of poverty are essential if we’re going to
long-term see a successful reduction in the crime rate in the city.
           I am
proposing what I’m calling the Rochester Children’s Initiative. It is a
guaranteed opportunity to intervene in the life of every child from birth to
the time they begin school, helping ensure that they have the right health
care, nutrition, and preparation for learning. It’s a combination of child-care
specialists that make home visits and neighborhood opportunities for young
parents to come and make sure that their children are getting support and that they as young parents are getting support for the
challenging and difficult job of parenting.
           I also want
to make sure we’re being more aggressive in our interruption of those people
already locked into drugs. So our drug-treatment options have to expand. Our
use of drug court has to expand. And we need to connect those juveniles who are
involved with problems with the law; we need to connect those folks to schools.
There’s a project right now where kids are basically pulled in and told by
cops: “We know who you are; we know what you’re doing, hanging around with the
wrong kids. You’re at risk here. We’re watching you. If you’re not careful,
you’re gonna wind up in the criminal justice system.”
           That
program right now doesn’t bother to invite anybody from the schools, and often
these kids are going to school, at least they’re enrolled in the school. I
would love as the principal or to have my vice principal invited to be part of
those meetings.
Do we need more
police officers? If so, how many?
           Well yes,
we need 50 police officers to being with. We need to come up to full
complement; we’re down 50 officers, and because the last police chief didn’t
keep his force fully staffed, everybody that’s left is carrying a bigger
burden. And everybody who’s paying taxes is left holding the bag, because we
have a lower level of service than we think we’re paying for.
           In the long
run, how many more police officers we can have depends on what we can afford,
and until I am able — it will take me a whole year to get back up to full
complement. In that time, I should be able to discern whether my bold economic
proposals are going to grow the tax base sufficiently enough to give us the
additional revenues to have the latitude to also grow the police force.
What will all of this
cost, and how will we pay for it?
           The
Rochester Children’s Initiative is based on successful similar programs run in Chicago,
North Carolina, Vermont,
and Ontario, Canada.
We anticipate that the cost will be somewhere between half a million and a
million dollars a year. I believe that those expenses will be shared among the
county, the city, and health-care providers in the area — the health
insurance companies as well as the hospitals and clinics.
Do we have enough information
to abandon the reorganization of the police department? If so, how should we
organize the department?
           Because
I’ve asked for a study, I would like to see the results of the independent
study. The administration has been having CGR crunch some additional numbers to
find out of their original suggestion was a good one or not. It would probably
be more appropriate to get that information from a more independent source, not
one that proposed it initially.
           Nevertheless,
the anecdotal response that I have received from citizens, from police officers
themselves, and from my own personal experience as a consumer of police
services, as principal of School 50, I believe the reorganization is not
delivering the level of service or the quality of service that we should
expect. If we’re gonna have the level of service that
I expect, if we’re going to have the level of beat integrity that I expect.
           In theory,
you ought to be able to have all those elements and have two sections. But you
know what? When I first came to this city, we had an eastside-westside police operation, and we decentralized it over 20
years ago to try and take police services closer to the citizens. And what’s
happened in this police reorganization is that we’ve lost that police-community
connection and that has to be changed.
           I’m sure
other people are just taking a stab and saying “I think we need quadrants; I
think we need to go back to all seven that we had before.” I can tell you that
the seven we had before the seven we had most recently was more effective than
what we had most recently before we collapsed it.
           I suspect
we need to return to a more decentralized system. And how many sections that is — whether it’s four or five or six —
will depend on the information I get from the analysis that’s independently
done and from a police chief who I think understands the importance of
community policing like the current acting police chief does.
How will you measure
success in public safety?
           I called
for an independent study of police services, and the intent is to evaluate the
reorganization, but part of that review that I added to the budget amendment
would give us metrics we could use to measure the success of our delivery of
police services.
           There’s
plenty of crime statistics, and the format for those are generated by the state
or the federal government, and we follow those patterns. But what is more
important to us, I believe, is not just measuring the crime rate. We also need
to look at the metrics about how people perceive the response of the police to
the challenges that exist here. So it’s things like
response time. It’s things that perhaps don’t get
measured right now. How many shootings we have gives us some sense of whether
we’re getting guns off the street or not.
This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.
