DeKalb cops try to win friends

Terrell Bolton acknowledges there is a cost to his signature initiative as DeKalb County’s police chief.

His patrol officers are so swamped that response times for high-priority 911 calls nearly doubled in four years, reaching an average of 11 minutes this year. But rather than having all available officers answer those calls, Bolton has devoted 50 new slots for officers to “interactive community policing.”

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Jessica McGowan/jmcgowan@ajc.com

Officer J.T. Hardy of DeKalb County’s interactive community policing unit talks to arrested suspects outside a home being searched for drugs. The unit doesn’t take dispatch calls; it works with local residents and acts on their tips.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DEKALB COMMUNITY OFFICER

• 2 p.m.: Officer J.T. Hardy starts his shift at the South Precinct on Candler Road. He discusses with other officers and his sergeant several complaints from residents received in the last 24 hours.
• 2:42 p.m.: Hardy drives as part of a convoy to a nearby home on Quillian Avenue, where neighbors have complained of people coming and going to buy drugs. A search turns up a pill bottle with residue of crack cocaine. The occupant is cited for creating a hazardous condition.
• 4:15 p.m.: Hardy meets his fellow community officers at a gas station, where they rendezvous with East Precinct officers to plan a roadblock at an apartment complex.
• 4:45 p.m.: The officers leave in a convoy for the apartment complex. Hardy helps stop drivers, ask for licenses and arrest people with outstanding warrants.
• 6:30 p.m.: Hardy sits in his car behind a grocery store where he bought a deli sandwich for dinner. He uses the vantage point to watch for traffic violators. While eating, he takes a cellphone call from a resident about a neighborhood problem.
• 6:55 p.m.: Hardy arrives at St. Philip African Methodist Episcopal Church for a meeting of White Oak Hills community association. He and a detective meet with about 20 residents until 7:37 p.m.
• 7:57 p.m.: Hardy meets the other community officers at a car wash. They soon begin stopping vehicles spotted by undercover officers who are watching for drug transactions in a nearby apartment complex. One officer finds a Mason jar containing marijuana in a young man's pants.
• 9:20 p.m.: Hardy returns to South Precinct to complete his eight-hour shift.

The 50 officers — and their five sergeants — were told early this year to cultivate relationships, hand out their cellphone numbers and become the resident experts for their own assigned slices of the county. The officers’ job description is to solve problems in the neighborhoods they serve.

That leaves other patrol officers still scrambling to meet the daily demands.

“We’re going to have to manage that,” Bolton said in an interview.

But he also pulled out a folder of community policing statistics to show that those officers have been busy too since the program began less than a year ago: 1,300 complaints received, 6,000 citations issued, 676 felony arrests, 431 misdemeanor arrests.

Another important statistic for him is the 760 neighborhood meetings community officers have attended.

“The public loves it,” Bolton said. Residents get to know their community officer, and then the tips start to flow, he said.

Up close and personal

The first order of business for the community officers of the South Precinct on a recent shift is a house on Quillian Avenue where neighbors suspect drugs are being sold. It is not the first visit for Sgt. D.N. Woods and his officers.

“The problem last time was they were selling marijuana. And as soon as I walked up, I could smell it — again,” Woods says.

The occupant — a woman with a newborn — allows the officers to look around. They call in a police dog. The search turns up crack cocaine residue in a pill bottle, enough to write the woman a citation for creating a hazardous condition. A man at the house is cited for loitering for drugs.

“C’mon, you see I’m trying to get out,” the woman says.

“That’s good,” Woods replies.

Though no one goes to jail, the citations and the swarming police presence are designed to send a message: go straight or go somewhere else.

The quick and visible police response also is intended to give law-abiding residents the confidence that someone will listen to their complaints. That is why they are given a particular officer’s name and cellphone number.

Officer J.T. Hardy, who was part of the search on Quillian Avenue, spends his dinner break a short time later sitting in his car behind a Publix grocery store eating a deli sandwich.

His phone rings. The caller has seen what looks like drug traffic at a house. Hardy tells him he has heard about the house, and if narcotics officers can’t look into it the community officers will.

“Give me a call, if you will, on Saturday if you haven’t seen us by then,” Hardy says.

After he hangs up, Hardy says such a call would have to get short shrift if he were a regular patrol officer. He could go to the house, but if he didn’t immediately find a crime, he would have to move on to another call.

After dinner, Hardy heads to a church Sunday School room for an evening meeting of the White Oak Hills community association. Detective Nate Garber also attends and tells the group about 12 burglary arrests in their area in the previous month.

He says three juveniles were caught because a resident saw them jumping a fence and called 911.

Andy Huff, the association’s president, urges residents to keep reporting what they see.

“We’re communicating weekly with the guys at South Precinct, and we’re getting results,” he says.

Back in the squad car after the meeting, Hardy says community organizations like Neighborhood Watch work.

“If we had one in every neighborhood, crime would come down, I guarantee you,” he says.

The cost of business

Community policing is a favored concept in police departments around the country, but some of its advocates say it has to be part of every officer’s job rather than assigned to a separate unit as it is in DeKalb.

That was the main question raised last year by Georgia State University criminal justice professor Robert Friedmann, who was hired by the county commission to assess Bolton’s plans for expanding the department.

Friedmann’s report said the unit should not exist unless Bolton could show how it was different from “the traditional concept of community policing.”

Bolton got the funding he wanted for the community unit, and he says now the county commission deserves praise for showing faith in the program.

He said he agrees with Friedmann that community policing should be practiced in every part of the department, and he will work to expand it.

“But it’s going to take time,” he said, and he made clear it also will take money. Bolton has asked for millions more to hire more officers and raise pay across the department.

“I just pray we get the resources we need,” he said.

More officers would mean fewer calls per officer, which is one of the necessary components for community policing, according to an analysis produced by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group.

The organization was asked to study San Francisco’s police department. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the group’s suggestions called for “making more time for community policing by cutting the time officers spend responding to calls for service from the current average of 42.5 percent to 30 percent of their work week.”

Officers spending less than half their time answering calls sounds like a dream in DeKalb. Keisha Williams, the civilian assistant director who oversees the community program, said, “Patrol officers spend 100 percent of their time on calls unless they are working a special [assignment] occasionally. But if calls back up, patrol officers are pulled off specials and back on calls.”