By Kevin Sack, The New York Times
The recent terrorist attacks are placing an intense burden on police departments around the country as officers juggle urgent new demands: responding to hundreds of reports of spilled powder, bolstering security in public places and even leaving their departments to serve in the military reserves.
Senior police officials worry that as a result, departments will become slower in responding to crimes and may not be able to close as many cases. And with their officers redeployed indefinitely, budgets stretched to the limit, the economic picture murky and officials concerned that the crime rate could begin to rise again after a decade of decline, they say they have had to begin rethinking the very nature of policing.
The shifting demands, for example, may force already understaffed departments to consider jettisoning crime prevention tactics like community policing, which have been praised for contributing to the decade-long drop in crime but require considerable manpower.
And the burden on local law enforcement will grow only heavier if the Federal Bureau of Investigation proceeds with plans to shed traditional portfolios like bank robbery and drug trafficking so that it can focus on fighting terrorism. As it is, the F.B.I. has essentially suspended all but the highest-priority investigations, federal prosecutors say.
There are no statistics yet on how the war on terror has affected local policing, but some city departments say they have already experienced direct side effects. In Philadelphia, for instance, the police commissioner, John Timoney, attributes some of September’s 37 homicides to the decision to move a number of narcotics detectives back to uniform street patrols in the city center. More than half of the September killings were drug-related, Mr. Timoney said. Under normal conditions, he said, he would have expected about 25 homicides last month.
“The homicides that are most amenable to police prevention are drug-related,” he said, “because there will be a shooting followed by a retaliatory shooting followed by another retaliatory shooting. So, to the extent you can get in there and stop it quickly, you may prevent future shootings of a retaliatory nature.”
In Los Angeles, the police department has been overwhelmed by calls about suspected anthrax powder, each taking several officers away from other duties for hours at a time. The department received 44 such calls last Tuesday, all unfounded, and it handled 375 bomb threats and reports between Sept. 11 and Oct. 10.
“Obviously, if we’re getting all these bomb threats and anthrax calls that we normally wouldn’t get,” Lt. Horace E. Frank, a department spokesman, said, “it’s going to take us longer to get to other calls.”
On the federal level, several prosecutors said it had been hard to find F.B.I. agents who could be diverted from the terrorism investigations. That has left investigations suspended and made it all but impossible to start new ones, the prosecutors said.
“I’ve got a couple of fraud things that were on track to be indicted in November,” an assistant United States attorney in South Florida said, “and another case was to have a big search warrant executed in the fall. And everything just stopped, and we were told we’ll revisit it in the new year.”
The new demands are not just taking a human toll. In Arkansas, the state police’s bomb-sniffing dog, Nero, has been called to 32 bomb scares since Sept. 11, more than four times the usual number. “My gosh, they’re running us ragged,” Col. Don Melton, the state police commander, said. “If we had frequent flier miles for our bomb dog he’d be set for life.”
Colonel Melton pointed out that his force of 650 officers provides much of the law enforcement in rural areas. “It’s just a tremendous distraction as well as a drain on existing resources,” he said of the constant calls about suspicious packages and powders. “There is work that’s not getting done.”
Hardly any city has escaped major costs, and mayors and other local leaders have begun heavy lobbying for financial help from state and federal officials. The United States Conference of Mayors projects that its 1,200 member cities will need at least $1.5 billion in the next year to maintain security at current levels.
Boston estimates that it is spending $100,000 a week on police overtime alone. Baltimore has had unanticipated costs of $2.6 million since Sept. 11, much of it for police, and city officials expect to spend $9 million by June 30, the end of the fiscal year. In Atlanta, a City Council member has proposed paying overtime at time and a half to police officers who have been on 12-hour shifts and are unable to work second jobs. The plan would cost the financially strapped city $700,000 a week.
After responding to 150 false alarms about suspicious white powder in the previous two weeks, city and county officials in Memphis decided to use a less expensive method of investigating such incidents. By using fewer officers and less expensive protective suits, which must be discarded after each use, the governments hope to reduce the cost of each response to $400 from $3,000, said Clinton Buchanan, director of the Memphis-Shelby County Emergency Management Agency.
At considerable expense, Memphis has also been stationing police officers at 28 locations considered potential terrorist targets, including its three Mississippi River bridges. Because so much remains unknown, Mr. Buchanan said, officials will wait another month or two before assessing potential long-term costs. “If smallpox comes into play,” he said, “we’ll be in a world of trouble.”
As time goes by, law enforcement officials clearly will be left to make difficult choices that pit short-term needs against long-term strategies. The most painful may involve whether to maintain community policing and crime prevention tactics that have contributed to a 30 percent decline in the national crime rate since 1991, according to F.B.I. statistics released this week. Those techniques often call for officers to be walking beats, developing sources and attending community meetings rather than responding to emergency calls.
Chief Gil Kerlikowske of the Seattle Police Department said: “Historically, every budget cut for the last 25 years has almost always started with crime prevention, because it’s difficult for anyone to evaluate the crime reduction impact of those programs. But I don’t think any of us want to lose all the gains we’ve made.”
Chuck Wexler, the director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a policy group in Washington, said police chiefs now must serve both the mayors of their cities and the president of the United States. “This much we know,” he said. “It won’t be good enough to forget everything we’ve learned about crime in the last 10 years. We’re going to have to balance the neighborhood crime need and the national security need.”