City manager says new community policing plan is what city calls for

City Manager Mike Matthes understands the Community Outreach Unit will be spread thin under a new plan.

“It’s the same amount of peanut butter on a lot bigger piece of bread,” Matthes said.

The city manager explained his vision of how the Community Outreach Unit would expand. A Columbia Police Department memo obtained by ABC 17 News over the weekend detailed that the department would take the eight-officer unit, which works in four neighborhoods, citywide. One of the eight officers would be assigned to a police “beat” of the city and work on problems they find in the area through interaction with others.

Matthes expected the four neighborhoods to see less of their community police officer, but said they would still have one.

“It will not change our approach to community policing,” Matthes said. “What it does is match a community police officer with the patrol officers who are doing the 9-1-1 calls and pulling the neighborhood into that, into that relationship.”

Matthes said the city would not be dissolving the COU, despite the memo referring to the new team by a different name and calling for officers to apply for it. Matthes called it a semantics issue between the department and himself. While CPD had already been using the Community Response Unit, or CRU, term when speaking about the team, Matthes said he preferred to keep the COU name.

The city manager said he first discussed the plan with the police department a couple months ago, prompted by a police department report on how to best implement community-oriented policing in the whole city. The City Council has not yet approved a final version of that report. Matthes said despite this, he felt the discussions were appropriate.

“We’re the experts. We do it everyday, we know what the police department does every day, we make this work, and so that’s the way we’ll describe it in detail, and it’ll be their decision,” Matthes said.

City Council members have criticized the decision to move away from the current model. Matthes and police chief Ken Burton expected the council to discuss the plan at its Monday meeting.