February 5-11, 2004

city beat

Cutting Corners

Back on the market: During the Safe Streets' heyday, corner of Fifth and Ontario was police-occupied territory. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Reductions in Operation Safe Streets program were planned all along.

by Amy L. Webb

A police officer from the 24th District stops at Second and Ontario streets before heading to what everyone calls "The Bottom." It’s a section of North Philly where drug lords and agitated kids once owned the streets. Lookouts, packing handguns, hide in the shadows of narrow alleys, and dealers, who mark their territory using different colored plastic baggies, still work their corners. The Bottom is a war zone. Most cops don’t put in for a transfer here.

The officer passes by the New Hong Kong Restaurant, where two bullet holes have pierced through the storefront and plastic sign. Inside, an Asian woman is standing behind thick plates of glass to take orders. The officer eyes a group of boys, who are watching him right back from behind the glass. This was one of the original corners targeted under Operation Safe Streets, but lately no cars have been monitoring activity here.

"Putting a guy on every dangerous corner was a terrific idea, but the department didn't think things through," says the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "All Safe Streets did was push the dealers indoors, where it's harder for us to get at them. Now there are fewer guys out on the corners, we're seeing more violence, and a lot of us think that things are going to go right back to where they were before Safe Streets. And then they're going to get a whole lot worse."

The 24th District officer and many others in the department say that Safe Streets has run out of money, and as a result, the program has been drastically scaled back. They also warn of an impending boomerang effect: Now that fewer officers are visible on the streets, drug lords think the coast is clear to take back their territory.

But Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson says that the integrity of the program still stands, and that the plan all along was to reduce the number of officers on Safe Streets corners and eventually to slash overtime spending to make way for the second phase: using narcotics officers and the highway patrol to arrest offenders.

The police department would not release the monthly amounts spent on Safe Streets since the program's inception. However records from the City Controller's Office show that monthly payments for uniformed police overtime -- the majority of which go to Safe Streets -- have decreased 48 percent, from $7.73 million in September 2003 to $4.05 million in January 2004. In October 2003, the department paid $6.34 million, which was 38.4 percent lower than the same time the year before. And in January 2003, the department paid $4.43 million, or 8.5 percent more than in January 2004.

"[These numbers] assess how much has been spent on the program," says Deputy City Controller Tony Radwanski. "About 98 percent of the money spent includes payments to Safe Streets, and there's absolutely no question that there have been some major cutbacks in funding," Radwanski says.

Shortly after Mayor John Street's re-election, Johnson announced some cuts in spending, but did not elaborate on a reduced police presence at Safe Streets corners. And in early January, the mayor told City Paper's editorial board that the Safe Streets program would be kept intact.

"Some people simply got it wrong," says Johnson. "It was never the idea to keep officers on 300 street corners continually. It was never our intention to keep all those officers out on the streets. People shouldn't have thought that."

When Operation Safe Streets officially launched in May 2002, it was in response to a growing presence of drug dealers in what Johnson calls "open air markets" in some of the worst neighborhoods in the city. Mayor Street wanted a visible police presence on street corners not to make arrests, but to prevent drug sales and to deter dealers from setting up shop.

"When we first went out there, we didn't know what was going to happen," Johnson says. "We were going to bomb the city with officers. Officers everywhere."

The officers deployed to street corners went after their working hours or on their days off, reaping the benefits of overtime pay.

"There was a dramatic difference in crime and drug sales," says a female officer in the 23rd District who asked not to be named. "It was a great chance to get our visibility up, and a lot of us are proud that the mayor and the commissioner took on this program."

At the same time, many of the tactical units, whose days were already spent working around Safe Streets corners, resented how much money the department was spending. "Here's a question for you," says one officer in the 24th District, who asked that his name not be used. "How can you take a group of officers, who've never been to this part of the city, who don't know where any of the streets are and who don't know the faces -- how can you expect those guys to be effective? We already knew who the players were, who was dealing, where it was happening."

In 2003, the city had 337 homicides -- up 20 percent from the year before. To be sure, the rate last year is still slightly below the city's 10 year average of 366. But violent crimes are increasing -- while police presence on dangerous corners is becoming harder and harder to see.

The 24th District originally had 40 Safe Streets corners, but the officer says that only 10 remain -- and that number is likely to shrink during the next few months. "All we've heard is that the money ran out, so they cut the program," he says. "We never heard about different phases." He says that with fewer police cars sitting on corners, a strong signal is being sent to some of the neighborhood's more violent offenders. "You know what's going to happen next? Crime is going up. Dealers are moving indoors. They're thinking that the district has less power on the streets. The heavy drug traffic may not come back, but other problems will." He says that car theft, gang activity and prostitution are among the issues the district will be facing.

Some say that Safe Streets had been cut because too much money was spent initially and right before the mayoral election. Last year, the police department racked up $32 million in total overtime payments between January and April, and $53 million in total payments between May and November. Johnson says that overtime spending for Safe Streets wasn't sustainable at that pace and that officers are largely to blame. "There are officers out there that are overly greedy," Johnson says. "They think that they should be able to get as much extra money as they want through overtime. And you have some officers who feel that they should be getting continuous overtime. It's not at their convenience that they should get overtime because they want to get Christmas presents or whatever. We found that a lot of those police officers were going on those corners and sitting in their cars and doing nothing. It was all about overtime to them, but it's not all about overtime to me."

Johnson meets weekly with district captains, and the group decides where officers are needed most in the city. First Deputy Commissioner Robert J. Mitchell, who is Johnson's second in command, manages the department's budget and now determines, along with the group, how to divvy up overtime allotments, according to Johnson.

Johnson argues that that the Safe Streets program had multiple parts and strategies, and the department is now moving forward as originally planned. "It may look like a change in strategy, but we’re in the next phase," he says. "We knew that the drug dealers would move indoors. So now we’re fighting the indoor traffic. We monitor an area for 30 to 60 days and if there are no problems, we’ll take officers off those corners. That was always the plan. If we had a million police officers, we could put one on every corner. But at this point, we need to put police officers where the problem is at. People are complaining that officers aren’t on their streets anymore. But I can’t put officers on corners if there isn’t any trouble."