Sunday, February 07, 2010, 12:19 PM
News, Opinion, Politics
By Stephanie Ramage
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH ACTING POLICE CHIEF GEORGE TURNER (AND COO PETER AMAN)
Last week, I was surprised to be contacted by the Atlanta Police Department about setting up an interview time with Acting Chief George Turner. I hadn’t requested it, but I took it.
When I arrived for the interview at City Hall on Friday, Feb. 5, I was greeted by not only Acting Chief Turner and two public information officers, but also Deputy Chief Shawn Jones, Chief Operating Officer Peter Aman, who would, it turned out, offer occasional insights and clarifications, and the mayor’s spokesman, Reese McRanie.
The interview was lengthy, and posting the entire transcript of my tape uncut would be cumbersome for the readers and our website. So, I will be publishing it in uncut segments. This is the first installment, transcribed from the end of the recorded interview.
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Stephanie Ramage: What’s your assessment of Chief Richard Pennington’s tenure?
Acting Chief George Turner: Personally I thought he was a great chief and that he professionalized our police department in that he understood how important it was to grow talent inside the department. If you look at the success he had in reducing crime according to what the FBI crime stats are, he was very successful in driving crime down. In the end, chiefs of police are judged by how effectively they deal with crime.
[Editor's Note: It’s toward the end of the interview and Reese McRanie, spokesman for Mayor Kasim Reed, gives a time warning. I move on to the APD's suggestion, at two consecutive meetings of the City Council's public safety committee in the past month, that the city add a police zone with a price tag of $20 million. I pointed out in my Jan. 31 column, "Say No to Zone 7," that a new precinct would require more brass--a major, leiutenants, etc.--and would cost more money with less benefit to public safety than simply adding more beat officers throughout the city. Deputy Cheif Shawn Jones introduced the idea to the public safety committee.]
SR: Let’s get to Zone 7. I’ve heard a lot about that. Now, of course, Assistant Chief Pete Andresen told me that’s only one of several options you’re looking at, but that happens to be the option we’ve heard most about in public safety committee meetings. What are the other options?
Turner: Let’s deal with that first. The Zone 7 initiative was simply something that our brain trust of crime analysis folk had pulled together more than two years ago now. It was an opportunity to create a seventh precinct to mitigate the geographical lines that challenge us specifically in Zone 4, Zone 6 and Zone 2, all very huge geographical precincts. What that draw did, it allowed us to take beats from Zone 4, Zone 3 and some of Zone 5 to create a seventh precinct space. We looked for space in the West End Mall area. The number that you hear is simply the start-up cost, that’s not the same number of officers, that’s creating additional officers, that’s what the number [$20 million] is so large.
COO Peter Aman: Just to put a pin in that, because I did read your piece on that [“Say No To Zone 7,” Jan. 31], the figures, and we can have some figures to share with you, you’re absolutely right, the size of the city of Atlanta doesn’t change, in fact that’s not reflective of, the Zone 7 plan was not just carving one zone into two pieces, it actually has an additional 111 [officers], so the plan for the zone and the cost is inclusive of 111 additional officers and that’s where you would get the additional crime-fighting ability and the bulk of the annual cost are all toward additional officers. Obviously, as the chief mentioned there’s a number of things being considered. Could you add those officers just to existing zones or beats or precincts? And how would that work? This particular Zone 7 plan is 18 months old or something, so it’s one of several options that were looked at. We are starting as a new administration to completely re-think, frankly, all the zones and all the coverage and that’s what the chief and his staff are starting to do, so I think it would be a mistake to spend too much time looking at Zone 7, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge the point that this would be incremental.
Turner: The truth is, some of that as you wrote in your piece, it does include physically expanding a new precinct and all of that is part of that cost. But the majority of that cost is additional personnel.
SR: Where would that money come from?
Aman: That’s the problem.
Turner: We’re not suggesting that’s the direction we go in. We are simply putting that out to the City Council to say, look, this is not where we think we can go. We are not suggesting that we go to a seventh precinct.
Aman: The reality is, under the current business model, we do not have the money to do that. The current budget does not give us the funds to have this type of expenditure. And the exercise that the mayor, and myself and the CFO are involved in right now is the budget planning for 2011, so we are just at the very beginning of this. But we know the city’s business model is fundamentally broken.
We’re only 10 percent of the metro population on an extreme small-scale of cities, we have extremely limited state funding. You’ve probably seen some of the coverage on that, and we’re split city-county, so we have Fulton and City of Atlanta which causes at least some duplication and lack of scale. So we have three major headwinds against us financially and from a business model perspective. Very few other cities are in that position. Boston has a small population relative to the metro, but it gets 25 percent of its funds from the state. If we had 17 percent of our general fund from the state, we could do this tomorrow. But we don’t, so we’re, obviously the mayor is trying to engage in a partnership with the state to figure out what we can do, there are discussions about a MOST [municipal option sales tax] and whether that is a potential model and obviously that is not something that’s going to happen over night.
SR: If it’s 18 months old and we don’t have the money to do it anyway—with all due respect, Deputy Chief Jones—why was it brought up?
Turner: It was brought up simply to explain to the council that these were issues we already had in the making. These were things we’d already created. If you recall, let me just take us back, Mr. [Councilman Michael Julian] Bond, the very first day of council, talked about doing a re-draw of Zone 4. That’s really where it was going to, and they said they wanted us to do a re-draw beat design in 90 days. The legislation was later changed to request we do that in 180 days. We began to work on just that. What we began to discuss is that we have made several changes in the last year.
If you recall, Zone 4, we placed two of the beats that were in Zone 4 back into Zone 3. The reason and logic behind that was it evened out the calls for service for both Zone 3, Zone 1 and Zone 4, there has to be a logistical reason on how you distribute resources and that was the driving, the majority of calls, not the majority, but a significant amount of calls. Zone 4 had a larger number of calls in those beats. What we did by pushing those two beats into Zone 3 was even out the calls for service.
As we move forward, we will be looking at a number of things. We have to look at calls for service, how the work is distributed, and we’ll look at a lot of that. We will look at, actually if you look at the total calls, the calls for service are greater in downtown Atlanta, however downtown Atlanta’s precinct includes less than five miles, the density of folk—and of course there’s growth in the daytime population just because of people working and the convention business is so great. Zone 4 precinct is 34 square miles, yet their calls for service are less than Zone 5. We have to be able to make a significant determination on how we split these resources.
I encourage you to go to the International Assoc. Chiefs of Police website, there are several models that they suggest on how you subdivide the work. And the Police Executive Research Forum has several models as well. So we’ll look at all of those recommendations to figure out what’s the best way to subdivide the geographical obligations that we have as police in City of Atlanta as well as the resources we presently have. Of course, CALEA, which is our national accreditation organization, it simply gives us a suggestion on what we use and how we use it to split up our resources and we use that assessment.
SR: Give me an overview of some of the other options.
Turner: We implemented one of the options when we put those beats back in Zone 3. Now we are in the process of looking at the growth of the community. Each year the communities are growing larger. The calls for service, for example, in Zone 1, we talked about how that has decreased down. We’ve talked about whether we can add more physical geographical area into Zone 1 because of the number of crimes we’re investigating down there, the number of people that are there. When I was there, there were 90,000 people in Zone 1, I don’t think we’re anywhere near that now. I think there are around 65,000 people in that community. So, those are all the things you have to look at when you look at a re-draw.
Aman: So, in short, the options are various configurations of either taking pieces of one zone and putting them into another or, in the case of Zone 7, splitting a zone and adding officers. I don’t know that there is—at the end of the day this is a little difficult to articulate in a news piece, but essentially the options are a series of different ways of carving up the city’s geography. It’s actually pretty complex because you effectively have to run a linear program on the drive times and distances and densities and map to crimes and you also have to look at the different types of communities and the underlying demographics of the community and overlay it with the linear program.
Turner [interjecting]: Natural borders….
Aman [cutting in]: Right, you’ve got major thoroughfares, railroads...It’s really a calculus of all these factors, so it takes 180 days to figure this out. The other options are the various ways we could subdivide the city. Zone 7 is the one that just sort of got the most attention, but there are a number of other ones.
Turner: We really presented that [Zone 7] as an option that really there is no way we can implement because of the financial challenges the city is in.
Aman: The objective of the mayor is to improve the staffing of the police department and increase the officers as quickly as we can, but we do need the financial resources to do that.
SR: I’m glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask, if we did have the money right now, what would be the priority? Paying the step pay increase the rank-and-file officers were promised or adding new officers? What would you do?
[Turner and Aman look at each other.]
SR: Which one should I ask? [I look at Turner.] You’re the chief.
Aman: I’ll give you the mayor’s perspective, since he’s the boss and I think the chief and I are aligned behind his perspective, which is: To successfully improve public safety we need to do both. We need to add officers and we need to improve the morale of the officers we have.
Now, when you say ‘steps’ you are talking about a specific plan which was actually eliminated by the previous administration for reasons they thought were appropriate. A step is different from a cost of living, and my understanding is, you should look into this, but at the time the [police] union and officers supported the removal of steps and replacing it with a COLA, a cost of living increase.
[Editor's Note: The IBPO never supported doing away with step-pay increases in favor of COLAs.]
Now, that’s just what I’ve heard. My standing is the way the step program worked was, you would get steps and at some point you would max out on your steps, so if you’d been in a position for a certain amount of time, you’d max out on your steps and then you wouldn’t get an increase and there were some people who felt that was unfair, so they moved to a COLA.
The reason I go into this lengthy detail is because the priority of public safety is both adding officers and treating officers fairly. When we say ‘treating officers fairly,’ sometimes we, myself, the chief, the mayor, use as short-hand ‘putting back in the steps,’ but in reality what I think we’re talking about is steps or COLAs or some form of fair, equitable cost of living adjustment over time so that our officers are treated fairly, and I think the officers generally understand that, I mean when we say steps, they understand that, at least when I have talked to Lt. Kreher about it, he says ‘a raise is a raise,’ that’s Lt. Kreher’s quote. [Editor's Note: He is referring to Lt. Scott Kreher, president of the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, the city's largest police union.]
SR: Well, that’s Lt. Kreher, that’s not Sgt. Kreher.
Aman: I can’t go back and talk to Sgt. Kreher.
SR: Exactly, conveniently for you. [All lieutenants, upon first assuming the new rank, are under a probationary status which generally discourages disagreement with command staff. Kreher was promoted to lieutenant in December.] So, does that mean that when Mayor Reed was promising the officers that would be a priority, bringing back the step pay increase, what was he talking about?
Aman: We’d have to ask him to find out exactly what he was talking about. We are currently examining these things as part of the budget process. He is in no way backing away from his promise to treat the officers to fairly and to put back in what you would call the steps or some sort of pay increase to reflect the cost of living. There’s no backing away from that, there’s no change.
Mayor Reed’s Spokesman Reese McRanie: I think we’re really talking about semantics. Whether it’s called ‘step’ or ‘COLA’ or some kind of increase.
Aman: Yeah, whether it’s a cost of living adjustment or a raise or whatever, it’s an increase in your salary and we are certainly looking at a variety of ways to put that back in place. We are also doing analysis of how people have fared in terms of their raises in the past.
You will hear various groups of employees say ‘oh, we haven’t gotten raises in seven of the past eight years,’ that is, from the data I have seen, not necessarily true. One year they may have gotten a step, one year they may have gotten a COLA, prior to that they had these $2,000 bonuses, so there’s a variety of things. In fact, I have a 3-page list of things going back to 1991, showing all different manner or sort of salary adjustments that have occurred and we are in the process of matching those up against inflation.
And I think when you see that list, and we’ll provide it to the press —we are still doing it, it’s rather complicated because there are so many different baskets of these things—you’ll be able to look then at how, not just officers, but firefighters, general employees, all city employees fared relative to CPI [inflation, Consumer Price Index]. The mayor’s objective is to introduce talent and merit in greater amounts than it already exists which is no insult to the people who work hard everyday for the city, but we are trying to actually up our game and to do that we know we need to pay people fairly and make sure their incomes keep pace and are competitive. We are doing all that sort of examination now.
[Editor's Note: Rank and file officers have told me that step pay increases are awarded for experience and are considered entirely separate from COLAs.] SP