Safety needs regional plan
On July 14 a young man was gunned down in front of my home and died on the neighbor’s lawn. He lay there, in a heap, for hours while police combed the area for evidence and neighbors watched in horror.
I heard the gunshots. I heard someone yell “Oh my God.” My neighbor watched the dying young man take his final two breaths. A life gone – just like that – with no explanation.
On Oct. 22, 1991, Rebecca West and Nikki Wood were abducted and subsequently found murdered. Two lives gone – just like that – with no explanation.
Families are still devastated. Citizens rallied to force a change in the West Central Neighborhood. We developed strategies to reduce crime. We collaborated with service providers, businesses, social services and govern- mental agencies to share resources, enhance public safety, mitigate risk and increase social assets in the neighborhood. We had a social fabric so tight it was working well. Then, over time, we relaxed. The social fabric started to weaken, and now some threads are broken.
No one person is responsible. No one agency is responsible. Spokane COPS was built to be run by citizens in partnership with police. The police don’t own Spokane COPS – the citizens do. Please go to your local COPS or SCOPE substation and volunteer. The young man gunned down is somebody’s loved family member. Don’t let this happen in your family.
While the police were responding to the shooting in my yard, I heard, on the police scanner, a call about gunshots fired on West Wellesley, a call for domestic violence on West Gardner, a gun found in the alley on the 1900 block of West College and a stabbing on West Longfellow. How are the police supposed to prioritize and respond to all these urgent calls for service at one time?
Times have changed. Budgets are making life difficult in many arenas. We must work together to fight crime in Spokane. We need to restructure our regional law enforcement to meet the needs of the citizens and 21st century issues. Citizens need to step up to the plate and set an acceptable standard for public safety in our region. As a “community advocate,” I pledge my volunteerism to help create new ways for the Spokane region to deal with law enforcement needs.
I am forming a Blue Ribbon Regional Team to look at developing a regional police bureau. We can take all the local law enforcement agencies and form one bureau. Portland, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh and Glendale, Ariz., are all cities that we can learn from in our restructuring plan. This plan has to be driven by a citizen initiative in partnership with local law enforcement and governmental agencies.
Envision a police bureau that is governed by an elected public safety commissioner. The budget is all handled through the Spokane County budget. The region could be divided into precincts with districts in accordance with our already existing neighborhoods. The district could serve as a basic unit of territory. Each district could have one commander and the rest of the officers could be in patrol cars, patrolling our streets. Within precincts, administrative costs could be minimal and all the existing law enforcement dollars could be used for direct service delivery on a per capita citizen ratio that is nationally recommended.
Citizens could volunteer in their districts and even come up with tailored innovative strategies to fight crime in their neighborhoods. The strategies are unlimited.
The resources for law enforcement will go further and impact public safety in a manner that is predicated on “prevention,” not just reaction to crisis. Restorative justice practices could eventually free up criminal justice dollars by reducing crime. That money could then be put into education to mitigate risk of our children to become part of the criminal justice system.
Stop feeding the administrative top of our criminal justice system as a reaction. We need to cultivate the roots of public safety and form new alliances in our neighborhoods so that all families can live in a free, safe community. Please volunteer to help.
The model can be anything the citizens choose to make it. It is time to think outside the box and bring our regional law enforcement agencies into a model that can deal with 21st century issues.