By Tom Dresner
Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune
COLUMBIA, Miss. — Seems like every day you pick up the newspaper and read about some new and disturbing violent crime in Columbia. It has many of us asking what’s going on. Naturally, you seek out your police department for answers.
I want to try to provide some thoughts about what’s happening in our city.
Census figures list our population at just more than 90,000 people, but we all know that figure is misleading when you factor in Boone County and the populations of our colleges.
Those of us older than 40 remember a very different Columbia and justifiably yearn for the attendant low crime rate that went with our town of old.
Bill Watkins, our city manager, was once quoted as saying, “Columbia is too small to be big, and too big to be small.” He’s right. We are in a difficult transition phase, where, especially in policing, we face the realities of large populations, rapid growth and the related rise in crime of most kinds, which makes us all more nervous.
We’ve had two tragic homicides in a short period of time. Although they capture our attention, I remind you our murder rate is still, thankfully, low. The first was the heartbreaking case of a little boy, the other drug-related. Before that, it had been quite a while since anyone’s life was unlawfully taken.
Youths who make bad choices tear wide swaths of theft, vandalism and sometimes violence through their neighborhoods. They are responsible for large spikes in our property crime rates. We’ve been alerting the affected areas with media releases and increased enforcement.
We’re pretty busy these days, and yet I can’t help bragging on the Columbia Police Department. You sometimes hear about the negatives more than the positives. But let me tell you there is some pretty amazing police work done 24/7 in your city. People almost never get away with murder here, and of more than 60 cases since 1994, we’ve solved every one of them. I don’t wish to trivialize the three pre-1994 homicides that remain unsolved. We will never rest or give up on those “cold cases.”
On Quail Drive, patrol officers arrived so quickly that their in- car video captured the suspect vehicle as it was quietly leaving the murder scene. It was invaluable later in catching the shooter in Fulton.
Many of us older than 40 remember the plate-spinners from variety shows of the ‘60s. We marveled at their ability to spin more and more plates and keep them all going. Very rarely did one fall and break.
Metaphorically, we’re doing the same thing: spinning plates that represent competing interests, from the desire for aggressive violent-crime enforcement to the judicious application of force. Another plate is represented by the need for better police- community communication across all spectrums. We are working hard to improve in that area.
Sometimes a plate falls to the floor and breaks. That might be customer service, where someone waits forever for an officer to show up on a minor crime and is met by a hot, tired cop who’s having a bad day and telegraphs how little he or she cares about this citizen’s particular problem. That one bad interaction negatively affects our entire department, possibly forever in that one citizen’s eyes. But that’s not indicative of the caliber of your police officers. They’re human and have bad days just like you do. Overall, if you could see us in action regularly, I think you’d be pleasantly impressed by the police work you’re getting here.
We have a Street Crimes Unit now, and its members are arresting dangerous people. At the same time, the judicial system has created progressive alternatives to jail partly because our jail is no longer big enough. Boone County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Knight recently said just that. I applaud him for it because there’s not a lot of sentiment for that particular fiscal investment. Murder suspects and other violent criminals need to be in jail. And in the years to come, incarceration capacity will need to keep pace with our growth. It’s just necessary, along with the progressive alternatives.
Columbia is a big city now. All of us together have to adjust our thinking about the investment in public safety we’re going to choose to make, or not, down the road.
The future is uncertain, to be sure. The great scientist Louis Pasteur once said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
In a true spirit of cooperation, not only can we all be better prepared, but we can also give that solo plate spinner a hand and keep all those plates spinning rapidly, solidly and in sync.
Tom Dresner is interim chief of the Columbia Police Department.
Copyright 2008 ProQuest Information and Learning