Oakland moves toward strategy of community policing

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and Police Chief Wayne Tucker announced Wednesday that more patrol officers will be added to the city streets starting Saturday in a reorganization plan they hope will reduce spiraling violence.

In addition, the department in the next three months will switch to a neighborhood policing model that would divide the city into five parts with each division overseen by a captain who serves as a kind of proxy chief. Currently, all officers report to one commander.

Though billed as a “100 percent community policing plan,” the initiative will assign 50 graduates from the police academy to patrol, rather than the normal division of 60 percent to patrol and 40 percent to community policing, in which officers spend their time working with community organizations, businesses and others to improve safety.

(AP Photo/Tim Shaffer)

Oakland recorded 148 homicides last year, the highest level in a decade. Meanwhile, crimes such as burglaries, robberies and assaults have prompted an outcry from residents who say officers don’t respond fast enough to calls.

Initiative billed as “100% community policing” Oakland is down about 87 officers from the department’s authorized strength of 803. Of the 716 officers now on the force, 200 are assigned to patrols, and at any given time the city has about 38 officers patrolling the streets. Those officers are inundated with calls.

On Saturday, 24 recent academy graduates will move to patrol, followed by 26 more in June, Tucker said.

With more officers on patrol, Tucker said, response times to citizen calls will improve.

Tucker said the patrol assignments are a stop-gap measure to fill shortages that must be met before community policing can be fully implemented.

Combined, the addition of patrol officers and the neighborhood policing model will better enable officers to respond to nonlife-threatening problems in neighborhoods, Tucker said.

“This step turns ... a major and significant and important corner,” Dellums said. “It takes us toward community policing.” The mayor added that the city and the department will work with the community to address the “myriad root causes” of crime. Most importantly, Dellums said, echoing recent recommendations from his public safety task forces, ex-offenders need jobs. The city will work with law enforcement and the private sector to provide more job training for parolees, he said.

“We are partners,” the mayor said. “We’ll deal with job opportunities, recreation opportunities and also coordinate with agencies in the private sector.”

Hampered by a police staffing shortage, Tucker said serious crime, while down about 8 percent compared with this time last year, is still a dire problem and that a major departmental restructuring is needed.

Dellums and Tucker -- who were joined at a City Hall news conference by State Administrator Kimberly Statham, who is leading a restructuring of the Oakland Unified School District -- said their plan was driven largely by a consultant’s report last year that criticized the department for clinging to antiquated policing tactics that do little to quell violence.

The Harnett Report, completed Dec. 28, recommended moving from “shift-based” policing to an “information-led, community policing model” with district captains held responsible for reducing the crime rates in their assigned neighborhoods.

Each captain would be an advocate for his or her district with latitude to ask the city for specific strategies ranging from, for example, the investigation of a spate of robberies to more officers or an after-school program.

The Harnett study faulted, not individual officers or managers, but “deeply ingrained traditions about how to perform and organize effective police work,” including the city’s use of a watch-commander system in which one captain or lieutenant is responsible for deploying resources citywide, with one such watch commander in charge during each of three shifts per day.

The report’s authors -- former law enforcement officials -- say the watch commander does not have sustained contact with residents or meaningful knowledge about neighborhood crime problems.

Oakland Police Officers Association President Bob Valladon supported the chief’s decision to fill patrol positions.

Copyright 2007 San Francisco Chronicle