THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 1, 1997 TAG: 9701010248
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 120 lines
How many cops does a city need to keep its citizens safe?
In many ways, that is the leading question at the heart of a nationwide debate on public safety.
It is a debate highlighted recently by the findings of a national magazine poll that ranks Virginia Beach among the safest and Portsmouth among the least safe cities in America.
Anyone familiar with crime in Hampton Roads would not be surprised by those findings. But the poll by Money magazine, published in the December issue, also shows that the size of a police department has little, if any, relation to how safe a city is.
That runs counter to the conventional wisdom that says more cops means safer streets. It is a position that almost every politician in recent years has taken.
But in older cities like Norfolk, the police department is more likely to shrink - or stay roughly the same size - than to grow.
``The department doesn't plan on adding any large number of officers,'' says Shelton Darden, an assistant police chief who leads Norfolk's uniform officer division. ``I think we are about where we need to be.''
If Darden is correct, that means 1996 will be the high-water mark for the number of police officers in Norfolk, a city that has been losing population for about 25 years.
It also means an end to what has been a steady growth in Norfolk's police force since at least 1980.
This change comes at a time when crime continues to top the list of voter concerns. And police staffing annually makes for lively discussions at city council meetings across the nation because law-enforcement salaries always make up a major chunk of municipal budgets.
``The question of staffing is a legitimate one,'' says Darrel W. Stephens, police chief in St. Petersburg, Fla., and former police chief in Newport News. ``It is an issue that the community and police must deal with all the time.''
``There is no simple answer,'' says Dr. Sheldon Greenberg, director of the Police Executive Leadership Program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. ``In this day and time of community policing and the use of other problem-solving techniques, there just is not a simple process.''
Politicians typically promote a simple answer: More cops mean safer streets.
In large part, the findings of the Money survey mirror the experience of police departments in South Hampton Roads.
Since 1980, despite a continual increase in the number of police officers, violent crime has risen in most of the region's cities.
During those 16 years, police departments have grown from 82 percent in Suffolk to 19 percent in Norfolk.
The Norfolk increase was the smallest in percentage partly because in 1980 the city had a force that was 200 officers larger than the one in Virginia Beach, the next largest. Back then, the Norfolk force was more than twice as large as any other police department in South Hampton Roads.
Since then, the Virginia Beach department has grown to almost match Norfolk's in size. In 1996, Norfolk had 689 police officers; Virginia Beach had 682.
But the two cities remain far apart in most measures of safety.
In the Money survey, Virginia Beach placed sixth-safest out of 202 cities surveyed. Norfolk placed 129th.
Other Hampton Roads cities included in the survey were Chesapeake in 26th place and Portsmouth in 166th place. Suffolk was not included in the survey because the city's population is too small.
The survey was compiled by adjusting the FBI's 1995 crime statistics to give greater emphasis to crimes considered most threatening by Americans in a recent nationwide poll. Murders might get the most attention, but burglary was the greatest concern: 66 percent called it a serious threat, followed by car theft (61 percent), robbery (60.4 percent), aggravated assault (50 percent), rape (48.5 percent) and murder (40 percent).
One startling finding of the Money survey was that the 10 safest cities had ratios of police to residents below the national average.
At the other extreme is Newark, N.J., the nation's most dangerous metropolitan area, where one of every 25 residents is a victim of violent crime. Yet Newark has 446 police officers per 100,000 residents - nearly double the national average of 230 per 100,000 residents, and more than triple the ratio of Amherst, N.Y., the nation's safest city, with 140 police per 100,000 residents.
Another barometer of police staffing - the number of violent felonies per police officer - also shows Virginia Beach and Norfolk far apart.
In 1995, Norfolk police officers handled more than twice as many violent felonies per officer as their counterparts in Virginia Beach. Similar results are expected this year, according to numbers comparing the first six months of 1996 to the same period in 1995.
The number of police needed by a city seems to have more to do with the size of the population than with the amount of crime, Greenberg says.
In Norfolk, even the addition of MacArthur Center, the city's proposed downtown showplace mall now under construction, will not necessitate the hiring of more police officers, Darden says.
But it will require some new law-enforcement strategies.
``We are looking at technology as far as MacArthur Center goes, such things as cameras in remote places,'' Darden says.
New officers added to Norfolk's force in recent years, Darden says, have gone almost exclusively to community policing.
Such programs are people-intensive, Darden says, and they inspire citizens to get involved in fighting crime in their neighborhoods. That kind of participation helps reduce the need for additional police.
``We don't ask the citizens to do their own policing, but we do ask that citizens be involved in crime prevention,'' Darden says.
Stephens agrees that community involvement and innovative strategies are more important to a city's safety than the number of police officers.
``The number of police has nothing to do with whether a community has a violent-crime problem,'' Stephens says. ``I really believe it is much more what you do with police officers than how many you have.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphics
RATIO OF POLICE TO VIOLENT CRIMES
JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot
SOURCE: Computer analysis by The Virginian-Pilot of violent crime
statistics
HOW HAMPTON ROADS CITIES RANKED IN SAFETY
[For complete graphics, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: CRIME POLICE DEPARTMENTS STATISTICS
HAMPTON ROADS STUDY SURVEY