More officers needed to fully realize federal task force
As few as fifty officers would help the police department fully implement parts of a federal task force’s recommendations.
Five Columbia police lieutenants spoke to the city’s citizen police review board about President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Each broke down a different aspect of the report, from police training to oversight. The same group presented information in January to the Columbia City Council, as well.
Some members of the board felt CPD was “ahead of the curve,” especially with the already-established citizen oversight board and requirement of some college credit for their officers. Others questioned CPD’s push for community policing, and what made it so labor-intensive that CPD felt it was difficult to expand its dedicated unit for it.
Lt. Geoff Jones, who oversees the Community Outreach Unit, said the opposite of community policing is “reactive” policing, where officers have no time for anything but responding to a call, investigating and generating a report. Jones said CPD’s patrol unit has around 70 officers, fewer than when he started in the late 1990s. That means officers watch calls “stack up” throughout a shift, with less than a dozen officers patrolling the city on some nights of the week. Officers want to better connect with the community, Jones said, but had little time to do so, and only more officers could fix that issue.
“I’m just going to be blunt,” Jones said. “If we don’t have those people, then we have no flexibility, or very little flexibility in how we use those resources.”
The latest city budget would allow for three new police officers. However, Lt. Scott Young said it would take six new officer hires to equal one officer on the street for 24 hours. That includes the vacation, sick and training time one new hire may make.
Lt. Jason Jones spoke about racial bias and procedural justice training, as recommended by the federal task force. All new hires will undergo four hours of racial bias training, but all agreed it would take more officers on the street to illustrate that training to the community.
