After a successful trial in Southeast Dallas, the Northeast Division of the Dallas Police Department hopes to initiate a neighborhood policing program in January designed to help reduce crime.
The program, quite simply, is a first step back to the days of neighborhood beat patrol officers who knew their neighbors by name.
The program assigns a specific neighborhood liaison officer to each of the five Northeast Division patrol sectors. Each liaison officer will meet with homeowners, apartment managers, neighborhood associations, schools and PTA groups to identify that neighborhood’s specific crime problems. The officers also will organize crime-watch meetings.
The only problem? Police officers typically don’t receive extensive training of this type in school.
“The only tool we have taught the officers is enforcement,” says Marlin Price, chief of the Northeast Division. “We have to teach them other options and resources available within the City.”
Price says the liaison officers won’t be the new hires unfamiliar with the City. Instead, the officers will be re-allocated from existing staff, resulting in an enforcement vs. prevention trade-off.
“Lower priority calls may take longer to answer” as a result of the re-assignment of officers, Price says, citing parking violations, loud music disturbances and other similar calls as examples.
“But when you balance that with prevention, it’s more important to prevent crime than to respond to lower-priority calls.
“This is not an indication of how important calls are, because all citizens’ calls are important. But it’s an indication of how we have to manage the resources we have available.”
In three to six months, Price hopes to increase the number of liaison officers to two for each sector.
The Southeast Division – acknowledged as the City’s biggest crime problem – began the neighborhood officer program in July. Since then, Southeast Chief John Holt says he has seen a decrease in drug-related crimes.
We’ve had a tremendous response from community groups,” Holt says. “But the community has to take responsibility for helping to solve problems.”
Prior to initiating the liaison officer program, Holt says: “We answered the same call over and over. We had trouble solving the problem.”
Under the new program, he says, neighbors will know their liaison officers and have their telephone numbers to call in an emergency.
With the Southeast Division’s initial success, Holt says the liaison program will be adopted Citywide. Price is happy the Northeast Division will be among the first to implement the program.
“Our population is becoming more culturally diverse, and we are seeing more violent crimes,” Price says. “I begged for them (liaison officers). I’ve been a supporter of this for a long time, and I’m interested in seeing it work.
