The closure of North and Southeast Precincts last summer was supposed to save the Portland Police Bureau nearly $3 million and make a significant dent in the Bureau’s spending.

Instead, PPB is the only city bureau in danger of spending its full budget this fiscal year, using $1.6 million more than was budgeted  to pay for overtime and hiring new staff without adequate funds to do so.

What’s more, the Bureau will be spending $2.9 million on employee cost-of-living expenses and $1.8 million on 26 newly hired personnel – two more than the number of positions eliminated through the precinct restructuring.

Last year, Portland Police Bureau Chief Rosie Sizer stated that the precinct proposal would provide PPB with $2.8 million in ongoing cost savings, mostly through the elimination of 24 sworn and non-sworn positions. In this year’s budget analysis, the bureaus’ Financial Planning Department says the Bureau realized $2.1 million in ongoing cost savings, leaving $700,000 unaccounted for.

Bob Del Gizzi, finance manager for PPB, did not respond to the Sentinel’s request for more information about the undocumented funds; at publication time, Bureau spokesperson Mary Wheat was still collecting budget information requested by The Sentinel.

All this spending puts PPB in a difficult, penny-pinching position for the 2010-2011 fiscal year, especially when – to add to the Bureau’s financial anxiety – upwards of 100 officers are eligible for retirement in 2011.  Due to a quirk in PPB’s calendar year that will give them 27 paychecks instead of the usual 26 by July 2011, many officers are expected to take the money and run. The Bureau must prepare for this looming mass exodus by recruiting, hiring and training up to 60 new officers, to the tune of $2.2 million.

Except that, as a financial analysis of the PPB budget reveals, they can’t afford to – and neither can the city as a whole.

Above: A few of the budget reductions proposed by the Portland Police Bureau. Snapshot from the Financial Planning Division's PPB Fiscal Year 2010-2011 budget analysis.

Plan B for Budget

The Bureau has proposed leaving sworn and non-sworn positions vacant, as well as cutting a sergeant and a detective from East or North Precinct.

In its analysis of the proposed PPB budget, the Bureau finance department took issue with the proposed elimination of a detective from either East or North Precinct, citing neighborhood livability concerns raised by citizens and City Council.

“The rationale for eliminating one precinct detective is not clear to FPD, as the intent doesn’t seem to be equity in the number of detectives assigned to each precinct,” the analysis says.  “It should also be noted that Council rejected the bureau’s proposed elimination of four precinct detectives last year over concerns about neighborhood livability.”

The analysis goes on to note that City Council added seven detective positions to the Police Bureau in the 2007-08 fiscal year in response to a 2005 city audit finding that the Bureau’s case clearance rates were lower than comparable cities, and that Portland had fewer detectives per 1,000 residents than other similarly sized cities.

The proposed cuts are most notable in comparison to the shiny new project PPB’s proposing to unveil next fiscal year.

To increase the safety of officers while on patrol, PPB wants to put surveillance cameras in 350 patrol cars and 45 patrol motorcycles. The price tag? $5.5 million.

 “It seems like an awful lot of money to be spending at a time like this,” said Arbor Lodge Neighborhood Association Chair Chris Duffy, referring to the brutal financial climate that has left all city bureaus strapped for cash. 

What’s more, said Duffy, putting money toward fancy new gear is not in line with the priorities of many citizens in North and Northeast, who value community policing above all else and feel that, as Duffy put it, “It’s falling by the wayside.

“People don’t have the opportunity to talk to their [neighborhood] officers anymore,” said Duffy, who’s also on North Portland’s Public Safety Action Committee (PSAC). “We’ve been used to those community connections, having officers driving through the streets of the neighborhoods and stopping to chat. Now they just blaze through on their way to an incident [in another district.] I can’t tell you how much of a change that has been.”

Overtime, over budget

Duffy and others suspect that the Bureau has been using overtime to achieve minimum staffing levels for shifts in North Precinct, a tactic that, while legitimate, has proven enormously expensive for the Bureau. The FPD’s analysis notes that PPB overspent its overtime budget by $272,000 last year and is on track to overspend by nearly $500,000 this year. Such expenditures make some residents wonder whether the cost savings from the consolidation of the police precincts have actually been realized.

Duffy added that the police absence went beyond patrol shifts. “We went from May to December without an officer at our neighborhood meetings,” said Duffy. At least one police officer is supposed to visit each North Portland neighborhood association’s monthly meeting. Other Northern neighborhoods also reported an absence of officers at their meetings, though on a less frequent basis than in Arbor Lodge.

This lack of consistent communication with officers deprives citizens of the opportunity to hear and request information about crime in their neighborhood. To rectify this, Duffy and North Portland Business Association Vice President Michael Salvo went straight to the top.

Using input from concerned citizens, Duffy and Salvo drafted a summary of the Jan. 27 Public Safety Action Committee (PSAC) meeting from the community’s perspective, and sent it to Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman and North Precinct Commander Jim Ferraris. In it, they criticize the police for dismissing their perception of increased crime with cherry-picked statistics at the meeting, noting that “using only reported crime statistics is not an accurate reflection of real crime rates, since many property crimes go unreported.”

The summary also lists specific citizen requests for data, including officer and patrol district coverage, response times to all types of calls, overtime costs, and crime statistics. To address the issue of certain districts being “zeroed out,” or uncovered when the patrolling officer is called to an incident outside the district, the summary suggests that the Bureau “Start logging the time that district cars inhabit their district throughout their shifts, day by day.  If a car is called away to assist in another district, then inhabited time stops until it returns. This tracking will determine if there is a relationship between a high crime rate and a low rate of inhabiting the district with a car.”

On March 24, Duffy and Kenton Neighborhood Association Public Safety Chair Doretta Schrock met with Commissioner Saltzman and Commander Ferraris at City Hall to discuss the summary and the citizen demands it contained. At a PSAC meeting that evening, Schrock reported that progress had been made. In addition to providing citizens with a list of North Precinct patrol officers’ names and districts, Ferraris promised to provide community members with a 30-day “look-back” chart that shows which officers worked on which days, which districts were filled, and which were zeroed out.

“We want to show we make an earnest effort to fill those shifts,” said Ferraris, adding that he has spoken to officers about being more visible and approachable in the communities they patrol.

Some community members think officers still have a long way to go. “I can’t hold evening services at my church because the little old ladies are afraid to go out at night,” said Edgar Rodriguez, pastor at Life Fellowship Church on North Lombard Street during the March PSAC meeting. “I don’t like the idea that I have to live in lockdown in order to have a safe life.”

Turning to the PPB officers, he said, “I need to see you more often on my streets.”