When he took the oath as D.C. police chief, Charles Ramsey promised to lead a department that responded to its citizens.
“It appears to me,” he said in a 1998 interview, “you have a lot of neighborhoods that just are not being adequately protected, or at least provided the kind of service that they’re entitled to.”
But eight years into his reign, a growing chorus of critics say that Ramsey’s community-oriented policing is more about public relations than police work.
These critics include rank-and-file police officers, community activists and elected officials, who say they’re not impressed by D.C.’s falling crime rate — down 40 percent since 1997. They say the department is still only reacting to crime trends, not shaping them.
“I think there are a few neighborhoods where community policing is working, but citywide we’re not seeing it,” said District Council Member Kathy Patterson, D-Ward 3.
Patterson, who is running for chair of the District Council, took a huge political risk earlier this year when she voted against adding 100 new officers to the police department.
She says the District already has more officers per resident than any other major city — 690 officers for every 100,000 residents — and she has no confidence that Ramsey will use the new officers effectively.
“I have serious concerns with the leadership of the police department,” she said.
Some residents of the gentrifying Petworth neighborhood do, too. They say they complained for weeks about a drug house in the 4300 block of Second Street NW but nothing was done.
“They were a little defensive,” neighborhood activist Amy Cataldo, 31, said of the police brass.
Police didn’t act until June 5, when the home’s owner was gunned down while standing on his porch.
Chastened by public outrage over the homicide, 4th District Police Cmdr. Hilton Burton ordered his officers to walk a foot patrol in a four-block radius around the house.
That means that none of the officers assigned to the foot patrol can answer any other emergency call — even if they’re the closest to the scene, said 4th District Sgt. James Black, who supervises patrols in that neighborhood.
“I’m very frustrated,” Black said. “We’re shifting around for public sentiment rather than using our experience to figure out how to fight crime.”
Since Burton ordered the foot patrols, there have been two shootings in the patrol zone — both with a police officer two blocks away, police records show.
Moreover, a police source tells The Examiner that D.C. police’s major narcotics unit was scheduled to set up camp near the drug house, hoping to cultivate sources that may lead to big suppliers. But if Burton’s foot patrol does what it is supposed to do, the dealers will move away.
This has not been lost on the neighbors.
“I know it’s a thankless job,” Cataldo said. “But I don’t see them out there until something major happens.”
Burton defended his decision.
“A lot of folks aren’t going to agree with us,” he said. “People want to see visibility.”
As to the narcotics unit’s plans, drug dealing “tends to dry up after a homicide,” Burton said, so there’s no need for the narcotics unit, anyway.
In an exclusive interview with The Examiner, Ramsey defended his approach to policing. He says that the more officers a department can put on the street, the better.
“As long as we’ve got people out here on the street getting robbed, getting mugged, houses getting broken into, our job is to do all we can,” Ramsey said. “And that means all hands on deck.”
The chief also says that crime has dropped since he took over. That said, he could use another 200 officers, for a total force of 4,100, Ramsey said.
“I don’t think you can ever drive crime too low,” he said.
Kristopher K. Baumann, chair of the police union, doesn’t buy it.
“You can throw any statistics around there you want,” he said. “Ask the 7th District how crime is trending.”
The 7th District is D.C.’s most violent. It saw 62 homicides last year and the violence shows no signs of ebbing, Baumann said.
“The department wants us to focus on Northwest and downtown. It’s clean and safe, but there are parts of this city where it’s still really dangerous,” Baumann said. “And that’s not OK.”
Ramsey says the department is working hard to close the gap. There are more officers on patrol now — more than 1,800, a 54 percent increase from when he took over — than there have been since the 1970s, when there were 5,100.
And police have more than halved their response times to emergencies, Ramsey says. In 1997, police took more than 17 minutes to respond to an emergency; for the first part of fiscal 2006, it took a little more than seven minutes to respond to an emergency.
Some critics aren’t impressed by the emergency response times. They say that the department is still too slow in responding to second-order problems. Statistics here are hard to come by, but critics say the anecdotal evidence is disturbing.
Critics like Benjamin Thomas. A retired manager from the National Council on Aging, Thomas, 83, lives near Southeast. He says he got stuck behind an abandoned car at the intersection of 8th Street and Benning Road one morning. He reported the car to police and, receiving no response, went into the 6th District station. An officer ran the car’s plates and said that it had been stolen.
Still the car sat — a full 14 hours, Thomas said. Police brass told him officers were tied up on other calls.
“I thought it was really strange that a car could sit in a major intersection without the police coming to see it,” he said.
Thomas says the lesson is clear.
“This police chief is focused on settling downtown, not the neighborhoods,” he says.
Ramsey says the department should do a better job of letting people know how they’re prioritizing calls.
Baumann says communication won’t solve the main problem.
“Assigning officers just to make the public feel like something’s being done doesn’t mean you’re solving the problem,” he said. “The public wants to be safe. They don’t want the appearance of being safe.”
Police-to-resident ratio
The District has the highest number of police officers per resident of any major American city.
>> The District: 690 officers per 100,000 residents
>> Baltimore: 498 officers per 100,000 residents
>> New York: 488 officers per 100,000 residents
