Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 6, Issue 12, December 2002

Copyright 2002 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article and photos below in your research. Be sure to quote the Seattle Sun as your source.

Letter to the Editor

Police Cuts

Thank you for your front-page article in the September issue on proposed cuts in the Seattle Police Department's Crime Prevention section. I feel confident that the huge community response in the form of calls, e-mail and letters to the City Council and Mayor, which resulted in saving seven Crime Prevention Coordinator positions for 2003 was, in large part, due to your article. Thank you, Seattle Sun and all the community members who voiced their support!

However, there are still many SPD cuts still in the 2003 City budget and I feel confident that these remaining cuts will have negative effects on public safety for Lake City and the North Precinct in the coming year, as well as making the patrol officer's job more difficult.

For example, the work of the Community Service Officers (CSOs) will more than likely have to be done by SPD officers.

Last year, CSOs worked over 81,000 hours. What do CSOs do? They respond and deal with landlord/tenant disputes, run away or lost children and confused seniors, assist homeless men, women and families obtain services and housing that helps get them off the streets, assist our house bound seniors and disabled who may be with out food, heat or medical services, they have a wealth of knowledge and working experience in making needed referrals for services though out Seattle and King County, transport abandoned children to DSHS and assist SPD patrol in numerous other ways that help get the officers back on the street to do their job. They also cost the taxpayer up to half as much as SPD patrol officers to do this needed work.

I believe that cuts to CSO staff will result in fewer SPD officer work hours spent doing their jobs and these needed services will be given at a higher cost. The school crossing guards are also at great risk for elimination at this time.

Two other very important cuts might also benefit from both community knowledge and then input to the Council before they take their final vote on the 2003 budget: elimination of specialty SPD units and reduction in the Warrant Section. The police department's Gang Unit was recently disbanded at a time when some gang activity has increased in the Lake City area.

SPD also recently stopped acting on warrants under $10,000. Thus, the "smaller" warrants are not acted upon except at a traffic stop or other chance contact with SPD officers. (If one were to search the outstanding warrants of Tacoma, one would find an active, outstanding $900 warrant for shop lift for D.C. sniper suspect Mr. Mohammad now under arrest in the East Coast. One can only wonder if history would be different had that "small" warrant stopped Mr. Mohammad sooner.) Cuts to the warrant section make active warrant service impossible.

Our police officers deserve our support and appreciation. In times of necessary City budget cuts we can all understand the need for some services to be ended or cut back. However, in the areas of public safety, cuts are harder to either understand or justify.

Community input works! Try it; let the City Council know your feelings about allocations of public money for public safety!

SONJA RICHTER,

Crime Prevention Coordinator, Lake City