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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Residents Call for More City Police

By Dan Boyd
Journal Staff Writer
    If it were up to those in attendance at a Tuesday night public meeting, a plan to hire 45 new Santa Fe police officers over the course of the next three years would be approved without further ado.
    Citing concerns over rising drug use and residential burglaries, most of those who testified before the city's Public Safety Committee said New Mexico's capital city urgently needs a greater police presence.
    "What more can we ask of these guys?" asked local resident Victor Lioce, who was one of more than 50 people in the crowd. "They put their lives on the line every single day."
    Police officials, who helped draft the aggressive hiring plan, say the police department ranks have largely stayed static so far this decade while the city as a whole has grown steadily.
    As a result, it currently takes officers an average of 22 minutes to respond to a service call, while so-called community policing, where officers patrol a specific area, has all but disappeared.
    A week ago, for instance, two high-profile armed robberies monopolized the department's resources, leaving no officers available to respond to a handful of residential burglaries.
    "Every day here in Santa Fe, we are three critical incidents away from the police department being paralyzed," Police Chief Eric Johnson said Tuesday.
    Members of the Public Safety Committee, which includes both city councilors and local citizens, appeared to be sympathetic to that argument.
    Before unanimously endorsing the hiring proposal, committee members indicated they share the community's concerns.
    "I think you probably need twice as many officers as you're asking for," committee member Mike Bowen told Johnson and other SFPD officials.
    But funding the plan could be trickier than praising its merits.
    If approved, the police plan would cost about $1.8 million to implement in the first year alone. As it is currently structured, the proposal calls for half of that money to come from a property tax increase and the rest to be derived from internal reallocations and a planned red light traffic camera program.
    Property taxes in Santa Fe have already seen several recent increases, including a $30.3 million parks, trails and open space bond passed by voters in March. Some reluctance was expressed Tuesday when it came to the notion of boosting the tax even higher.
    Others, however, said they're willing to fork over a bit more money if it makes local streets safer.
    "I don't mind spending a quarter a day," said Peter Komis, the president of the Don Gaspar Neighborhood Association. "I'd spend a dollar a day."
    The plan, which will now take another step forward in the City Council's approval process, will likely still face scrutiny from councilors who want proof that 45 new officers would make a tangible difference in crime levels. There's also no guarantee police recruiters would be able to find and persuade the targeted number of new officers to come to Santa Fe.
    But the proposal does have the support of Mayor David Coss, who attended Tuesday's meeting at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center and called public safety a "basic building block" of the city's ultimate success.
    If the plan is approved by the end of May, the Santa Fe Police Department could begin the search for 15 new officers and three new support technicians on July 1.