The recent claims by Mayor Mystrom that his switching of patrol officers' shifts from a 4 day, 10 hour a day work week to a 5 day, 8 hour a day work week was the determining factor in a recent lowering of the crime rate is misleading.

As the president of the Anchorage Police Department Employees Association, I have watched as the Mayor and his administration increased the number of sworn police officers hired at the Anchorage Police Department. While that increase is commendable, it has not changed the nature of the department from one of reactive call-shagging and investigation to the proactive entity within the social services delivery system that a true community oriented policing program demands. The former is our reality, staffed at 1.3 officers per thousand citizens, or 335 sworn officers. The latter is a dream, where 2.5 officers per thousand citizens would allow for true community oriented policing. To have the staffing necessary for true community oriented policing would swell our ranks to 644 officers.

As a "reactive" department, we have never had the luxury to impact crime before it manifests itself into a statistic, and no tweaking of a shifting configuration could ever create a major impact on reported crime.

For today's "crime rates" are, in reality, "reported crime rates", and can present misleading notions as to the comparable safety of a community. While the ratio of criminals to law abiding citizens has changed little since the days of Cain and Abel, social and economic factors have been determined to play a huge role in the type of crime and the amount of crime in a community. David C. Couper, nationally renown expert in police training, in his report for the Police Executive Research Forum, "How to Rate Your Local Police", refers to the eleven factors in the parameters set by the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report as having the greatest influence on crime: the size of the community and its population, and how crowded the area is; how the population is composed, particularly in terms of age structure; stability of the population with regard to residence, mobility, and transience; economic conditions, including job availability; cultural conditions, such as educational, recreational, and religious characteristics; climate; effective strength of law enforcement agencies; what law enforcement emphasizes in its administrative and investigative roles; the policies and other components of the criminal justice system(i.e., prosecutorial, judicial, correctional, and probational); citizen's attitudes toward crime; and how citizens report crime.

First of all, if we had 644 officers in Anchorage, you'd probably see crime statistics go up before they ever went down because we'd be out there turning over rocks to find bad guys. In 1996, the first year crime really starts to go down, the Police Service District was expanded to the Hillside, adding quite a few more folks from a relatively stable, low crime area into the general mix. That would bring the numbers down. And no one can argue that the economy has been bad, particularly on a national level. As a community, Anchorage is getting an older, more stable population, and as a whole the community embraces a conservative value system. All of this points to lower crime rates.

As far as the impact of law enforcement entities, while more law enforcement officers on the streets could , as Couper says, "increase citizens' confidence in the ability of the police to solve crimes, and accordingly, their willingness to report crimes to the police." But then crime statistics would go up. Maybe the 5 day, 8 hour a day configuration was less efficient because more officers were, in reality, handling less reported crimes, leading to a lower crime rate. The recent attempts to refocus the controversy from a breach of a collective bargaining agreement to a matter of pubic safety is misleading and disingenuous. Every cop with more than a couple of years on the street knows that crime is a function of opportunity or passion, and crime statistics coat-tail national trends. Those very trends have, over time, become a bubbling stew of numbers with various recipes of interpretation, manipulation, and interpolation, seasoned locally and made palatable to the public when served with a flourish by politicians and political appointees on graphs and charts. It pains those of us who labor in the kitchen to see a red herring tossed in for good measure.

Sergeant Rob Heun
President
Anchorage Police Department Employees Association
343-6404