Favoritism feared in plan to fight crime in precinct

By Michael Ko
Seattle Times staff reporter

	Clark Kimerer
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Despite a strapped budget, the Seattle City Council's public-safety committee has scraped together $400,000 for a pilot project to help the Seattle Police Department fight crime.

But the plan is on hold because of worries about police micromanagement and divvying up limited resources among neighborhoods. The city is also looking at pursuing private funds.

At City Hall yesterday, police brass, council members, several neighborhood groups, representatives of Mayor Greg Nickels' office and citizens examined a proposal to deal with the East Precinct, which includes heroin hotbeds like Broadway and Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill, and the Madison corridor in the Central Area, which has an above-average number of violent crimes.

With comment from three community meetings, the Seattle Neighborhood Group and the city's Office of Policy and Management came up with specific suggestions, such as paying police officers overtime to work on a bicycle patrol and hiring a fund-raiser/grant writer to find more money for public safety.

Getting the entire proposal off the ground wouldn't cost the city extra money, said Nick Licata, chairman of the council's public-safety committee.

The proposal pulls $400,000 out of a $1 million playfield-improvement project on Capitol Hill and uses it instead to fund public-safety projects in the same area.

The improvement involved turning natural grass into artificial turf, but council members reasoned that the playfield, in Cal Anderson Park, first needs to be cleared of its significant public drug problem.

But there are obstacles to the East Precinct plan.

The Police Department doesn't want to be micromanaged by outside groups. Deputy Chief of Operations Clark Kimerer said the department wants to remain flexible with its resources.

The dedicated bike squad, for example, might be a good idea this year, Kimerer said, but next year the department might need an undercover narcotics detective.
 
He added, "We have an entire city to police, made out of a lot of neighborhoods."

Also, some worry the East Precinct plan would set an unfair precedent for neighborhoods that are politically organized — like Capitol Hill — to get the most police resources.

Pete Rogerson, a citizen member of the North Precinct Advisory Council, said if the police budget is "micromanaged in different directions by outside groups ... it could become a free-for-all, with all kinds of deserving interest groups competing in this way for a piece of the police budget, possibly to the detriment of the greater common good."

Responding to a growing number of citizen complaints about Cal Anderson Park last fall, the mayor and the police chief released a 17-point safety plan for the park, including converting patrol officers to a bike squad.

But this has created a strain on the regular patrol watches and cannot be sustained in the long term, according to the Police Department.

The bike patrols also would be expensive to maintain. A standard overtime shift of six officers on bicycles with a supervising sergeant would cost $2,723 a day — $100,000 would buy 37 days of eight-hour shifts.

Bob Scales, senior policy analyst for the city, recommended the council wait several months, until more businesses on Capitol Hill are contacted about the possibility of private funds.

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