Point Austin: Magic Numbers
At budget time, the public safety ratios become sacrosanct
By Michael King, Fri., Aug. 19, 2011
That was Mike Clark-Madison (see "It's a Good Economy, Stupid," Aug. 23, 1996), and I'm particularly grateful for M-COTS, about which we're still arguing in 2011. Jump to May 24, 2002, when Clark-Madison wrote: "A line chart showing that this year, 93% of Austin's sales and property tax collections will be spent on public safety. Next year, it will be 97%. Perhaps we should just employ Austin police to collect taxes and eliminate the middleman. ... The city had already committed, and says it remains committed, to bringing up police staffing to the magic 2-cops-per-1,000-citizens ratio." (Note: the rest of the city budget, then as now, is largely underwritten by the city's "enterprise" departments – Austin Energy and Austin Water, etc. – which transfer percentages of their income to the General Fund.)
Move to "Point Austin," March 23, 2007, when the Statesman was pounding the APD for spending too much on overtime while idly dodging the question of how that came to be. "[T]he recession that followed 9/11 cut hard across the board, and among the austerities imposed at the time was to cut back on hiring, including new officers. But the declared policy goal remained '2.0 officers per thousand' city residents, and simultaneously the city adopted a minimum staffing policy of 80% per shift ... [and] supervisors had the authority to call in officers on overtime to make up the difference."
How High the Sky?
That brings us close enough to 2011, after three years of a grinding recession that has produced persistent city budget deficits and renewed the perennial question: How many is enough? Entering the final round of budget discussions, Council Member Bill Spelman has questioned the "arbitrary ratio" of 2.0 officers per thousand residents, noting that 65% of the increase in this year's General Fund will go to hire 47 new APD officers (plus two for the airport police), simply to maintain the 2.0 standard. "The APD is the only city department where our resource needs are defined by population," Spelman told me, "and not by workload, level of service, or citizen need. ... Our needs in APD need to be on the same level playing field as every department in the city."
Other officials were quick to respond that whatever the number, we need more COTS (aka "sworn officers"). Mayor Lee Leffingwell told me he considers the two officers per thousand "a national standard," adding, "I'm reluctant to experiment with fewer and see if that works" – and Council Member Mike Martinez told the Statesman his own question would be, "Is that high enough?" APD Chief Art Acevedo acknowledged to me that the 2.0 number is essentially arbitrary – "some departments in other cities have five per thousand with worse outcomes," and continued: "What I want to focus on is not necessarily a ratio. I want to focus on what is the cost of crime, what bang is the taxpayer getting for their dollar in terms of the department's service delivery, and what level of service do we want to provide."
It's entirely understandable that Acevedo would advocate for more APD resources. The question remains: Is M-COTS the best way to spend additional money, even within the department?
Force Multipliers
Since we've been having this argument for many years, I asked Spelman if he expected his skepticism to gain any more traction this time around. He answered that he isn't necessarily advocating fewer police resources just smarter deployment. "We need to ask ourselves, 'What's the best use of whatever money we're going to put into the police department?' Sworn officers, or some combination of more sworn officers and more detective positions (which cost a little more) and more civilians? ... We could add a lot more capacity more efficiently to the police department if we add fewer sworn officers, more detectives, more civilians."
It's no secret that the department is wearing thin in support personnel, most publicly in the emergency dispatcher department, where the turnover has been brutal and produced at least one embarrassing screwup when a suicidal offender was repeatedly transferred and put on hold instead of being referred to police negotiators (see "Point Austin: The Monitor Comes Knocking," May 27). Leffingwell and Acevedo both insisted to me that citizens would miss a direct police response much more than a missing dispatcher – but if the call never gets through in the first place, who's going to answer it?
I don't expect Spelman's reasonable questions to make much of a dent in the now-fixed idea (and declared city policy) that 2.0 COTS per thousand is the "line in the sand" (Leffingwell) against an inevitable Austin descent into anarchy. I just wish, in light of that magical arithmetic, that "X per thousand" librarians or books or social-service workers or firefighters or infrastructure repairmen or crime prevention specialists or even, for God's sake, 911 dispatchers, could also work their way more firmly into the official and public consciousness of what's necessary to manage a modern and growing city.
It also wouldn't hurt to understand that all these things cost real money, and that a modern city needs a modern tax structure, including an educated public willingness to pay more for common needs and better services. But that's an argument that begins further uphill, at the Capitol – and the lack of good sense per thousand in those parts severely rivals the Texas drought.
Count Point Austin's tweets per thousand @PointAustin.
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