The Detroit Free Press
DETROIT — Summoned by the Detroit City Council to discuss the city’s crime rate and her department’s hits and misses, Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings received some encouragement and took some lumps Wednesday.
Recent controversies involving the 2003 slaying of Tamara Greene, who danced using the name Strawberry, were largely sidestepped. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s State of the City proposals to recruit 300 officers and create six mobile police stations were discussed indirectly.
Bully-Cummings began the meeting with a presentation on the city’s crime and staffing statistics. She said serious crimes, such as homicides, robberies and rapes, dropped 7.5% in 2007, but home invasions are up this year over the same period last year.
The solution, she said, is to have more officers on the street. Since December 2005, the department has lost 550 officers through attrition.
But during the nearly two-hour question-and-answer session with council members, Bully-Cummings admitted that hiring 300 officers may not be enough.
“The issue is ... putting cops where crimes are,” Bully-Cummings said.
Barbara-Rose Collins implored fellow council members to give the Police Department priority in the upcoming budget. “I think we have to bite the bullet and do it,” Collins said.
Councilman Kwame Kenyatta asked the chief whether department investigators plan to interview Joyce Rogers, the retired Detroit police clerk who swore in an affidavit to seeing a police report from Greene. Greene allegedly performed for Kilpatrick and his friends at a supposed 2002 party at the Manoogian Mansion. Greene was alleged to have been assaulted by the mayor’s wife, Carlita Kilpatrick.
The chief said the tip the department received from Rogers through Michigan Crimestoppers contained “no new information that we did not have in the homicide file.”
Bully-Cummings took the most heat from Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, who railed against delayed response times for police calls.
Watson said the process of responding to police calls is “broken.”
After the meeting Wednesday, Bully-Cummings said possible threats the mayor mentioned during his State of the City address Tuesday are “not something I am going to talk about publicly.”
Copyright 2008 The Detroit Free Press