…Let me address a couple of points. In his nearly six years on the city council, Fenty has visited numerous crime scenes in his ward shortly after the crime occurrence. He has met constantly with police and citizens to examine the issues impeding police and has supported police on the street and focused community policing. He recognized and understood the drain on patrol forces, which prompted him, along with Councilman Jim Graham, to introduce a bill in October 2005 to increase the MPD force by five hundred additional officers. I guess since no emergency had been declared the rest of the council wasn’t interested. 

Let’s look at the emergency that was declared. A heinous crime occurred on July 9 in Georgetown. The media played it to the hilt and alarmed the citizens in that area. The political outcry compelled the administration to push the Police Department to put more officers on the beat. But the chief can only significantly increase personnel on the street in the short term by declaring a crime emergency that suspends the notification provisions of the police labor policy. With that declaration, citizens were upset all over the city, which prompted the administration to rush out an emergency crime bill. An emergency is when the unexpected happens that temporarily overwhelms resources available to deal with the occurrence. So the chief pulled three officers from each of the other six districts to meet the Georgetown emergency. Now, lets go back to July 7. Early that morning east of the river there were three homicides, one a double. Already overworked detectives in 6D were even more stressed out to cope with those. But this apparently was not considered an emergency. No extra forces were made available to 6D. Perhaps it didn’t meet the definition of emergency because it wasn’t unexpected and there already were insufficient resources to deal with the ordinary. I’ll leave it to you to ponder the discrepancy in definition. Meanwhile, the council passed the crime emergency bill. It provided for cameras. What number? Oh some number, since no advance thought was really put into how many, where they should go, or what was trying to be achieved. But this is an emergency, let’s pass the bill first, then try to figure it out. Oh yes, while we are at it let’s tighten up the curfew on juveniles , no matter that most crimes are committed by adults. then as an after thought let’s increase the force by some number. Of course it takes a couple of years to get one hundred officers recruited, trained, and certified. But this is an emergency, let’s get cracking.

Now Adrian Fenty didn’t ask me if he should vote no. But had he, I would have said absolutely. Maybe it will be a wake up call that this action by the council and the city administration was nothing more than doing something that would really look good, make citizens feel at least something is being done, and take the pressure off without actually achieving much.. But now the council can really ignore doing something serious about the systemic problems that are wrecking the Metropolitan Police department. Let’s get Fenty for telling us the emperor had no clothes on. This is from Ron Linton, retired assistant chief, Metropolitan Police Department, who supports Fenty’s public safety policy approach.