Chief Frank Limon plans to put at least nine beat cops on regular walking patrols and another eight patrol officers on bicycles. He needs help buying the wheels.
Limon discussed those plans in a conversation Wednesday.
He said his department is unrolling a new effort to get more cops out of cruisers and into contact with citizens on regular patrols. You know: community policing.
People from the Beaver Hills district donated two bikes, and will be rewarded with two of the new bike cops, Limon said. He asked businesses in other parts of town to donate new bikes, too, to help get the new effort into gear.
“The community wants to see us,” Limon said. “It’s more neighborhood-based police.”
In the busy Democratic Party mayoral and aldermanic primaries earlier this month, candidates spoke a lot about bringing community policing back to New Haven. Especially walking beats.
Limon said the changes are part of a campaign he’s calling “fall maintenance,” to follow up on the “safe summer” effort that concentrated motorcycle cops and others in trouble spots throughout town.
As part of that effort, he plans to assign regular foot patrols to identified hot spots in each of the city’s nine districts.
“They won’t be out there full time. They’ll be out there certain hours of the day in certain places where we feel the community has concerns, like Kimberly Avenue and Grand Avenue,” Limon said. He said district managers will recommend the spots.
Meanwhile, Lt. Luiz Casanova, who returned to duty this week after being out due to an injury caused by a car crash, announced at line-up that he’s looking for officers to volunteer for a beefed-up bike patrol unit. Casanova said Wednesday that at least 20 officers volunteered.
“It’s a great thing. I would compare it to walking beats, except you cover so much ground, and you have that one-on-one contact with folks in the community,” Casanova said.
The department has nine certified bike officers, but has been down to just four assigned bike cops, who are often pulled off for other duty. Click here and here to read two “Cop of the Week” stories about how officers felt that bike and walking beats helped them stop crime.
The goal is to staff 10 to 12 bike officers in the afternoon shift, Limon said. As for police on foot, he aims to have between two and four for each district.
Part of the bike staffing problem has been mechanical: Most of the department’s bikes are old and in bad shape, according to Casanova and Limon. Even the four or five usable bikes need more upkeep, Limon said. He said the department has 15 bikes more than 15 years old. He said he aims to replace as many of those as possible through business donations.
Once the wheels are in, the department will start with an eight-member bike patrol, Limon said. Besides the two in Beaver Hills, he said, the unit’s members will sometimes work out of neighborhoods, sometimes join together for special operations.
Mayor John DeStefano Wednesday said these plans are part of a larger rethinking of how to “develop personal relationships” with citizens in neighborhoods. That’s the big goal, he said. Bigger than the question of whether to deploy cars, bikes, or shoe leather on the beat.
“Bikes might help. The larger issue is the relationship. You don’t need a device to have a relationship,” DeStefano said.
Still, he suggested, bikes can help. “A lot of citizens will feel good about it. A lot of cops will feel good about it,” he said. Developing one-on-one relationships “is sometimes harder to do,” DeStefano said, “when you’re locked up in a Crown Vic.”
Classic DeStefano--co-opt a critics campaign. (he has done this with cycling advocates, child advocates, homelessness advocates, undocumented immigrant advocates, and many more)
Kerekes should be proud that John has finally heard the message.
I have two questions.