Incoming D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said residents shouldn’t expect to see officers walk the beat in all parts of the city.
Increasing the number of foot patrols has been a staple of Mayor-elect Adrian Fenty’s plan to fight crime. Beat-walkers would increase police presence, improve relations with neighbors and lead to an increase in intelligence gathering, he said.
Lanier has been a proponent of community policing and even wrote her master’s degree thesis on the subject, but she said foot patrols need to be targeted to certain areas to be effective.
“It would be wrong,” she said, to automatically order foot patrols to all parts of the city. District commanders will look at areas where foot patrols would be the most effective, she said. The beat-walkers are most effective in business districts such as Adams Morgan, or where there are a lot of pedestrians such as Takoma Park or the public housing area of Carver Terrace.
But D.C. police union headKris Baumann said the Metropolitan Police Department doesn’t have enough officers to safely increase the number of foot patrols. The beat-walkers would slow the time it takes for police to respond to emergencies. He said in the 6th District on the east side of the Potomac River, there are so many calls and so few officers that there’s often a backlog of 20 to 30 emergency calls.
“I got guys who’d love to get out there,” Baumann said. “But we can’t until their workload is cut back.”
Lanier said she would add patrol cars to areas where the response time suffered.
American University criminal justice expert William Chambliss said most evidence indicates that foot patrols are effective, but not a panacea. Because the District of Columbia is a relatively concentrated geographic area and has one of the nation’s highest number of police per capita, the department should be able to move more police to foot patrols without increasing response times, he said.
Lanier said she used to walk the neighborhoods when she started, and when she became a district commander she walked the beat with rookies to show them how to do it. The officer needs to get to know the law-abiding citizens as well as the drug dealers and let them know what is expected, she said.
“It’s not just walking,” she said.
