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As Budgets Shrink, Cities See an Impact on Criminal Justice

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/07/national/07CRIM.html

June 7, 2003
As Budgets Shrink, Cities See an Impact on Criminal Justice
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

PORTLAND, Ore., June 6 — The Portland police budget has been cut by more
than 10 percent in the last three years, and the strain is showing.
Station houses now close at night, and the 960-member force is down 64
officers. With no money for overtime, undercover drug officers sometimes
simply stop what they are doing — for instance, tailing suspects or
executing search warrants — when their shifts end.
Because the city also has little money for public defenders, Mark Kroeker,
the Portland police chief, said officers were now giving a new version of
the Miranda warning when they arrested a suspect in a nonviolent crime.
"They effectively have to say, `If you can't afford a lawyer, you will be
set free. Enjoy,' " Chief Kroeker said.
Crime here is rising, and Chief Kroeker says he is not surprised. In the
first four months of the year, shoplifting is up 10 percent from the same
period in 2002, car break-ins have increased 12 percent, the number of
stolen cars has risen 19 percent and home burglaries have jumped 21
percent, police figures show.
"The scary thing is that the worst results are still six months down the
road, as the bad guys realize nothing is going to happen to them, and then
you start to get an increase in gang shootings, armed robberies and
homicides," Chief Kroeker said.
The cycle that is bedeviling Portland is emerging around the country, law
enforcement officials say, as cities cut spending on all areas of criminal
justice, including policing, prosecutions and prisons.
In Multnomah County, where Portland is located, the district attorney's
office, the county courts and the public defender's office, which are
financed in large part by the State Legislature, are so short of money
that they have stopped prosecuting drug and property crimes, like burglary
and auto theft, until at least July 1.
The police commissioner in Seattle, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said that because
of budget cuts he had reduced his force by 24 officers and 50 civilians
this year and put a freeze on the hiring and training of new officers. The
city now has about 1,250 officers, a police spokeswoman said. Burglaries,
car thefts and shoplifting are up 18 percent this year, Mr. Kerlikowske
said, though violent crime has remained steady.
In Minneapolis, Robert K. Olson, the police chief, has cut 118 officers
from his 900-member force this year because much of the money for the
city's police comes from the state, which is running a budget deficit.
Chief Olson said he had lost another 81 police officers because President
Bush had essentially eliminated a Clinton administration program that
provided money to add 100,000 police around the country.
In San Diego, long known for having a low ratio of police officers to
population and a low crime rate, John Welter, the interim police chief, is
no longer able to fill the positions of the six or seven officers who
retire each month. Mr. Welter said he expected to be 100 officers short by
next spring, "the worst situation I've faced in 34 years on the job."
Beyond budget cuts, the war on terrorism is also depleting law enforcement
resources. Chief Olson, in Minneapolis, said he had to assign 16 officers
to guard the city's waterworks against a terrorism threat, with no federal
money as compensation. But he said he considered himself almost lucky that
15 of his officers were called to active service in the reserves or
National Guard during the Iraq war because he did not have to pay those
called to military duty, saving money for other officers' jobs.
The Portland police have also been hurt by orders from Washington to go on
terrorism alerts. The Columbia and Willamette Rivers run through Portland,
and the police have spent more than $2 million guarding the many bridges
during the alerts, with no sign of money that was promised by the federal
government.
What is particularly painful, experts say, is that many of the strategies
devised in the 1990's to reduce crime are now being abandoned or cut back
because of the national economic slump and widespread budget cuts.
"It's like watching `broken windows' in reverse," said James Alan Fox, a
professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston,
referring to the `broken windows' theory that the police could prevent
serious crimes like robbery and murder by first cracking down on smaller
crimes that blighted neighborhoods, like graffiti and drug dealing. This
theory played a major role in the crime-fighting tactics employed by
William J. Bratton when he was police commissioner in New York.
The fiscal crisis in New York City, which is facing an estimated $3.8
billion deficit, has had a significant effect on the Police Department,
whose $3.2 billion budget has been cut by $250 million in recent months.
In the past three years, the department has shrunk by more than 4,000
officers to a force of about 36,500. At the same time, the city has
reassigned about 1,000 officers to counterterrorism duties, at a cost of
roughly $150 million a year.
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly has said that the New York department is
struggling under the financial constraints but has managed nonetheless to
keep crime down, an 8 percent decline so far this year on top of a 6
percent decline last year.
Commissioner Kelly has credited a new program called Operation Impact that
has narrowly focused his more-limited resources on dozens of areas around
the city that have consistently been the scene of violent crimes and
shootings.
Here in Oregon, Sheriff Bernie Giusto of Multnomah County said he had had
to lay off jail guards as a result of the state budget deficit, reducing
the number of beds available for inmates to 1,462 from 2,071. Sheriff
Giusto said he was already figuring out which categories of criminals he
would not accept when state officials declared that on March 1 they would
no longer pay for public defenders except for the most violent offenders.
"I put on my sheriff's uniform and I went down to the Legislature in Salem
and testified," he said. "I told them, This is how bad Oregon has become —
law enforcement has to come beg you for money for crooks, so we can
appoint lawyers for them and prosecute them and hold them in jail."
Under the United States Constitution and Supreme Court rulings, anyone
charged with a crime must have a lawyer, and no one can be held in jail
without having a lawyer.
To save money, Jim Hennings, the executive director of the public
defender's office in Portland, has given up a month's salary and made his
lawyers give up two weeks' pay.
But the Multnomah County courts are now operating only four days a week,
and the district attorney, Michael Schrunk, and the presiding judge, Dale
Koch, have agreed to try only serious violent felony cases.
All felony property and drug crime trials have been delayed until at least
July l, and Mr. Schrunk and Judge Koch say the backlog of cases could
choke the courts. Instead of being prosecuted, misdemeanors are being
settled as a violation, the equivalent of a parking ticket, to keep the
backlog from growing.

-- continued --

Mr. Schrunk, who has been district attorney since 1981, has seen his own
office shrink under budget pressure to 77 prosecutors from 99 in the past
two and a half years. He has largely had to give up some of his favorite
innovations: a drug court, a mental health court and a community court for
resolving low-level disputes. And it pains him, he said, not to be able to
prosecute misdemeanors.
Officer Rebecca Wooten of the Portland police says she has seen the
effects of this first hand. Last week Officer Wooten arrested a young man
in a garage burglary and took him to the police station. There he was
given a ticket instead of an indictment. Within hours, the man was
arrested again on suspicion of burglary. Officer Wooten, 48, has 25 years
on the force, and when she reaches 50, she said, "I'm gone as soon as I
can retire."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

$8.88 an hour.... WTF? please tell me that's for part timers and not full time guys? WTF do you top out at?

God bless you guys working for the low wages [beer] My old place didn't pay well but it was still higher than that...