Six months ago, right about the time their new community police officer Lesandro Santiago began patrolling the Bartlett Park neighborhood, Tom Tito began noticing a difference in the community he's called home since 1973.
Drug houses started getting raided more regularly. Shootings dissipated. Gang warfare ended. Life in Bartlett Park returned almost to the way it was before the '80s crack epidemic swept through Southside St. Pete. New residents moved in. Home improvement TV star Bob Vila even came out to help build a home. And just three weeks ago, Officer Santiago, with the help of a landlord and neighbors, busted a drug and prostitution house that had plagued 14th Avenue S. for months.
But now Tito worries his neighborhood's progress will slip backward. St. Petersburg Police Chief Chuck Harmon restructured the police department last month, eliminating 41 community police officer positions — including Santiago's.
"I'm really concerned," says Tito, former president and longtime member of the Bartlett Park Neighborhood Association. "[Officer Santiago] really has made a difference by spending time in the most dangerous parts of the neighborhood and with the most dangerous people. I think it helps build that bridge between police and residents."
Harmon's decision to scrap the separate unit of community police officers in favor of a more centralized system of patrol officers is the most significant change in the department's structure since former police chief Ernest "Curt" Curtsinger adopted the community policing program in 1991. Neighborhood leaders argue that Harmon's new initiative — which splits the city into three districts with four officers each to share the responsibility of community concerns — is the end of community policing. Harmon says it's a new beginning.
"It never made sense to me as a chief that 10 percent of officers were doing community policing and 90 percent felt it wasn't their job," Harmon says. "We have gone from 43 to over 200 community police officers. It's not really a loss. It's a transfer of responsibility."
By adding the 41 CPOs to the patrol officer ranks, Harmon says this will give the bigger pool of patrol officers more free time to respond to these concerns.
Officer Santiago, Bartlett Park's former CPO, agrees.
"Before, I would have the sole responsibility to work these issues, and so I would have to try and find someone for assistance," he says. "Before, you had one officer, now you have 200 officers to help you."
As Harmon frequently points out, many police departments besides St. Pete's are undergoing such shifts. Federal budget cuts forced departments in Los Angeles and Cleveland to eliminate their community policing units two years ago. Other departments have followed their lead from Madison, Wis., to Asheville, N.C. In Florida, none of the large metropolitan areas — Jacksonville, Orlando, Miami or Tampa — has a separate community-policing unit.
"We adopted a philosophy of community-oriented policing department-wide," Tampa Police spokesperson Laura McElroy says about TPD's 2004 decision to disband its Firehouse Cops program that put an officer in every community's firehouse. "Our goal was, we had to reduce crime."
McElroy says the 60 officers in the firehouse program were transferred back to patrolling, and every officer was trained in how to be effective community police officers.
Before the change, McElroy says, Tampa's crime rate was soaring. Within a year of transferring the 60 firehouse officers into the pool of patrol officers, crime went down 12.2 percent — the first decrease in 20 years — and crime has continued to decline by double digits every year since.
During the same period, the number of crime watch groups mushroomed to 160. Christie Hess, vice president of the Old Seminole Heights Civic Association, says that's no coincidence.
"It was not easy to get where we got to," Hess says about the change. "It can be painful. But after two years it has worked out great."
But what works in Tampa won't necessarily work in St. Pete, says Mark DeSareo, a former CPO and president of Pinellas' Police Benevolent Association, a local union.
"Tampa has double the amount of officers that we do, and each officer takes half the number of calls," he says. "This [change] is putting more work on an already overburdened police force. It destroys community-based policing as we know it."
Although Harmon denies it, the restructuring may be his way of dealing with the continuing shortage of officers in St. Pete's police department. As of November, the department had lost 62 officers this year to resignation, termination or retirement, while only hiring 52. It follows a pattern of officer shortages that has been evident since 2003 (see "Only as Safe as You Feel," Aug. 23).
Critics also wonder whether Harmon ever fully embraced the community policing concept. Last year, the police chief directed CPOs to help with curbing drug and prostitutions in certain areas of the city. Residents, like Bartlett Park's Tito, say CPOs were rarely spending a full 40 hours in their assigned communities, sometimes leaving to do traffic detail. And three neighborhoods did not have CPOs for several months — including 13th Street Heights, one of the most crime-plagued neighborhoods in the city.
But the most significant criticism, and worry, is that violent crime will return to neighborhoods like Bartlett Park.
"I don't think the high-crime neighborhoods should get rid of the CPO," Tito says. "This is not a Southside problem. It is a Pinellas County problem."
Tito wonders aloud if the drug bust on 14th Avenue S. would have ever happened under a new system where neighborhoods will have to compete for police attention. (Officer Santiago, Bartlett Park's former CPO, counters that the new system would make such busts easier to carry out.)
Three weeks after the changes, neighborhood leaders say it's too early to tell what effect it will have. Those that have called the service lines report that the response time is quick, but whether that translates into a lower crime rate has yet to be seen.
"I'm keeping an open mind," Tito says. "We'll just have to wait and see."
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2007.