Cobb police say need for officers, vehicles is dire

1/22/13: Jack Forsythe is hired as the county's new director of public safety.

7/23/13: Forsythe requests 30 officers to implement the overlapping shifts at two of four precincts.

8/9/13: Forsythe asks for Hankerson's approval to form a selection committee that would pick a firm to perform a police staffing and management study.

8/23/13: Forsythe provides more information about the benefits of overlapping shifts, and says the 30 officers, cars and equipment will cost $2.7 million in the first year, then $2 million a year afterward.

9/13/13: Forsythe details retention issues at the police department, explaining how they are creating unsafe conditions during major incidents and at shift changes, and the costs associated with losing officers after the county has trained them. The memo also argues for a take-home car program and lists the benefits of that program.

9/13/13: Forsythe writes a second memo again detailing the costs of adding 30 officers, along with charts that show staffing levels juxtaposed over calls for service. The charts detail that the department has the least manpower during shift changes, which is when they have the highest number of calls for service. A second set of charts show how the 10-hour shifts would alleviate that problem. The memo also details how much overtime was reduced after one of the county's precincts went to a 10-hour shift pilot program and shows a comparison of population and department staff for counties in Metro Atlanta and nationally.

10/2/13: Forsythe again asks for Hankerson to move forward with the staffing and management study, saying it is the "most impartial and accurate way" to measure the department's needs. He says the study would look at retention issues, staffing levels, facilities, equipment and technology and the number of vehicles.

10/21/13: Forsythe details the complex formulas used to calculate manpower needs at the department and provides authorized force comparisons with other departments nationally and in Metro Atlanta.

10/25/13: Forsythe provides crime statistics with an explanation of how they were used to calculate the department's needs.

11/1/13: Forsythe responds to a Hankerson request for fleet maintenance data showing cost differences between shared and take-home vehicles.

11/4/13: Forsythe provides information requested by Lee showing overtime savings with 10-hour shifts.

11/6/13: Forsythe provides Lee with the Request For Proposal related to the staffing and management study.

11/22/13: Forsythe provides Hankerson with another cost estimate for adding 30 officers and implementing 10-hour shifts. Also says more officers will be needed because of the Braves move to Cumberland, and the department will need to hire cops faster to be ready for Opening Day 2017.

12/2/13: Forsythe again asks for permission for the selection committee to evaluate the proposals for the staffing and management study: "Without approval to proceed, the committee ceased activity."

1/6/14: Forsythe resigns with a four-page memo that says "… short of some catastrophic event, you will continue to deny or take no immediate action."

Standing in front of hundreds of business and civic leaders last month, Cobb Commission chairman Tim Lee forcefully assured them of the county’s unwavering support for public safety.

It was a highlight of Lee’s State of the County address, delivered one week after Cobb’s top public safety official, Jack Forsythe, resigned in a stinging four-page letter that said the police department was on the verge of “crisis.”

Lee didn’t mention Forsythe or the letter directly. Instead, he told the gathering that the county commission “has always committed … to provide the finest in public safety.”

But dozens of internal memorandum, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through Georgia’s Open Records Act, show Forsythe felt little of that support. In fact, he and Police Chief John Houser repeatedly warned of the police department’s dire need for more officers, new vehicles and smarter scheduling.

In those documents, Forsythe and Houser push a plan they believe would begin addressing the problems, while also making the department more efficient. If fully implemented, they said, it would cost about $5 million a year, or one-quarter of what the county will spend annually on the Atlanta Braves stadium.

The memos also stress that the plan would help resolve what Forsythe and Houser believe is the department’s biggest problem — the mass exodus of officers, leaving for better pay and benefits elsewhere. And they left no doubt about the urgency.

“During shift changes, very few officers are left in the field. The availability of officers to respond to calls … or provide backup is often limited or non-existent,” Houser wrote in an Oct. 23, 2012 memo to Lee and Hankerson.

Forsythe was more explicit in an October 2013 memo, after a year of inaction on their plan: “This reduced ability to respond to emergency calls … is a danger to our citizens and our officers.”

To date, the county hasn’t implemented any aspects of the three major ideas put forth by Houser and Forsythe.

When asked in an interview last week his reaction to the memos, Lee responded: “My first thoughts were that we have an extraordinary group of gentlemen and ladies that work for Cobb County police. If you ask, a majority of the people will say they feel safe here without even thinking about it.

“We do a great job with what we have.”

Two days after that interview, the county announced that commissioners will vote Tuesday on adding 40 new police positions. Commissioner Bob Ott said he was made aware of the plan to add officers Wednesday, the day after the AJC’s interview with Lee and Hankerson.

A county spokesman said commissioners will figure out how to pay for the new officers during this year’s budget sessions. It will take more than a year to fill the positions.

“Lip service”

The need for substantial investment in public safety couldn’t come at a worse time for Georgia’s third-largest county, which was thrust into the national spotlight last year when the Braves announced their intended move to Cumberland after the 2016 season.

The county is taking on the baseball project at a time when it is strapped, still struggling with extremely tight budgets three years after raising property tax rates by 16 percent to help resolve a budget deficit.

The deficit, projected at $30 million, led to police officers being furloughed for the first time in the county’s history.

“We’re still not out of the woods,” Hankerson said last week.

Cobb also is under financial pressure because of its pension system, one of the most poorly funded in Metro Atlanta. As of last year, the county had just 54 cents for every dollar needed to cover promised benefits in the coming decades — even after pouring in more than $10 million above its minimum required contribution during the past two years.

By way of comparison, the pension systems in DeKalb and Fulton counties are both more than 65 percent funded.

Frustration inside the police department boiled over in a recent employee survey, which featured common complaints about not having enough officers for backup on dangerous runs, or to get vacation and sick time approved; driving vehicles with more than 150,000 miles that break down frequently; waiting hours for patrol cars because of inefficient shift change operations; and not being issued basic equipment.

“I have been patrol rifle certified for over 1 year. Still have not been issued a rifle,” one officer wrote on his survey. “The vehicle situation is atrocious. It is not uncommon for half the officers on a shift to wait … 45 minutes to two hours … on a vehicle.”

Many of those taking the survey blamed county officials.

When asked what they “dislike or would change about Cobb County” and what are the department’s “top three challenges,” about half of the 373 responses specifically named Lee, Hankerson or the board of commissioners, often in combination.

“From the county manager to the Board of Commissioners, these people … live with their heads buried in the sand,” one officer said.

“Our citizens do not recognize the diminished capability of our agency, mainly because our leaders keep telling them that public safety is a priority when in reality this could not be further from the truth,” said another.

“We have nothing more than lip service paid by county leadership to the serious problems at the department,” according to a third.

The Braves move was often mentioned, typically as one of the department’s biggest challenges. And the juxtaposition of police furloughs with a huge investment in baseball did not go unnoticed.

“We were furloughed and now they have almost $400 million to buy a stadium?” an officer wrote. “This really upsets me the most.”

It’s actually closer to $600 million.

Commissioners have committed $537 million over 30 years to pay principal and interest on bonds that will be issued in spring. Tack on $35 million in capital maintenance costs, and the annual payment is more than $19 million.

About $8 million of that amount will be covered by county-wide property tax revenue, which is more typically used for things like public safety and pensions.

Lee blamed the survey results on Forsythe.

“The guy that quit … sold what he was trying to accomplish to the troops before he had permission to do so and, when questioned about it, he blamed us for not being responsive, as opposed to taking responsibility himself for overselling and over committing,” Lee said. “Then he quit.”

Billy Mull, a retired officer and president of the Cobb Fraternal Order of Police with its 500 members, said the department’s high turnover rate is a result of cops losing faith in county leadership.

Mull called morale within the department “horrendous,” and offered as proof the 71 officers that left last year alone. The department lost an average of 47 a year in each of the previous four.

And consider this: Houser’s 2012 memo lists 43 officers who voluntarily left the department in a year spanning 2011-12, with 87 percent saying they bolted for better pay and benefits. Eleven of those officers took jobs with smaller city departments; one left to be a manager at Waffle House.

“When you lose that many … there’s something wrong,” Mull said. “We have ranking officers, been there their entire career, they’re leaving for the school system. We’re having officers take early retirement because they don’t like what the county is doing.

“Then the Braves come along.”

A plan

The first public mention of a plan to fix problems at the police department came in Houser’s memo from October 2012. The chief, a 32-year veteran of Cobb’s force, said months of discussions and planning happened before pen hit paper.

The plan is pretty simple: Add 30 officers so that two precincts can move from an eight-hour shift schedule to overlapping, 10-hour shifts. That’ll cost about $2.8 million in the first year, then $2 million a year thereafter. Another 30 officers would be added in some future year for the other two precincts still operating on the eight-hour model.

In conjunction with that, the chief wants to implement a take-home car program, which would require buying about 280 cruisers over five years, at about $3.6 million annually.

Forsythe and Houser say those two steps would make the department and the community safer by eliminating the lack of manpower during shift changes and during catastrophic events requiring a massive police response. The two argue that the take home car program is a break-even proposition in the long run, because of lower maintenance costs and longer vehicle life. And the cars, they say, would help address the retention issue.

In an interview last week, Houser said his department has the officers and vehicles to respond to big events, like when two officers were shot in separate incidents in the past seven months. But that type of call, especially at shift change, leaves them vulnerable should another big event happen around the same time.

Lee and Hankerson were told of this problem in the memos: “In a recent manhunt after an officer was shot, officers at every precinct were stationed on the perimeter,” Forsythe wrote Sept. 13, referring to the July shooting of Officer Daniel Rogers. “At shift change, these cars were on the perimeter instead of being at the precinct for the oncoming shift. This resulted in officers … with no means to assist on the perimeter, or get in service to handle calls.

“Assigned vehicles solve this problem entirely.”

The same thing happened when officer C. A. Ville was shot Feb. 4, according to Houser.

“We’ve been very lucky so far,” Forsythe said in an interview. Houser added that officers had a terrible time handing off vehicles during the two recent winter storms.

In the Thursday email to police announcing the upcoming vote to hire additional officers, Heaton said the county plans to add 67 vehicles — not enough for a take-home car program, but ample to “prevent officers from waiting on vehicles at the precincts.”

Heaton also said the county is taking action on other issues: getting bids to purchase vests and helmets capable of repelling rifle shots; supplying all officers with patrol rifles; performing an analysis of the take-home car program; and soliciting a management study that could point to the need for even more investment, in things like facilities and technology.

Prior to the announcement, Lee and Hankerson told the AJC that the county is just now embarking on a year-long wage and benefits study that’s necessary before deciding what to do about police. They also said they asked new Public Safety Director Sam Heaton to study the information presented in the Forsythe and Houser memos.

The police department, authorized for 609 officers, is currently about 100 short of full staffing. The number of vacancies will drop to 40 after two cadet classes finish training later this year, but one of Forsythe’s memos estimates that the department will have to deal with another 61 defections in 2014.

“I want you to know what improvements are underway and realize that my immediate plan does not address all issues at once, but it is a step in the right direction,” Heaton’s email said.