Atlanta police audit ties slow response to scheduling

Most of south and west Atlanta have periods every day when police officers are so busy that they may have to leave one incident they’re responding to in order to assist in a high-priority call, an audit report released Wednesday has found.

The 39-page report found that for an average of more than two hours a day, every patrol officer is responding to a call in zones 1, 3 and 4. Zone 1 covers west Atlanta. Zones 3 and 4 cover nearly all of south Atlanta.

Auditors used the findings to recommend that the Atlanta Police Department consider having officers work during days and times when calls for service are at their peak.

“[The audit] seems to suggest they may have opportunities to look at how they schedule officers,” said Leslie Ward, the city’s internal auditor.

Although the report did not study how this affects police response times, some community leaders said the audit cements their contention that police are often slow to respond to crime in south and west Atlanta and that there are not enough police officers in those neighborhoods.

“It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, the response time is really, really bad,” said Steven Lee, a psychologist who is president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Drive Merchants Association.

Lee asked Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington about the issue at a recent town hall meeting in southwest Atlanta on public safety.

“We need officers where the crime is,” Lee said during an interview Wednesday.

Police officials who worked with auditors were unavailable for comment Wednesday. The report does say the Police Department agreed with the audit’s recommendations that it find ways to better deploy patrol officers. Ward will discuss the report with council members next month.

Auditors studied police patrol staffing from March 1, 2007, to March 31, 2008. In December, the city placed police officers on weekly furloughs to save money as Atlanta manages through a budget shortfall.

Public safety has concerned many homeowners in recent months as the city has seen an increase in auto thefts and home burglaries. A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution review of response times found Atlanta’s average police response time of 11 minutes and 12 seconds lags behind other cities of similar size. Atlanta, however, has 826 patrol officers, a patrol force larger than that of most of the cities studied.

Auditors found patrol staffing often doesn’t match the workload in some parts of the city. For example, the average number of officers with vehicles in Zone 4, which covers southwest Atlanta, was 14 most hours of the day, but there were more than 20 calls each hour for service in that area between 5 and 9 p.m.

Some City Council members and community leaders have suggested the city create more police zones so officers can respond more quickly to crimes. Pennington has said a new zone would be a multimillion-dollar proposition.