Public Safety Driving City Council Agenda
February 4, 2011 3 Comments
This past Monday, the Sunnyside City Council held a special meeting to discuss public safety. A large crowd turned out, prompting the council to break with its usual rules of not allowing public comment outside of regular meetings.
(From L-R) Council Member Mike Farmer, Deputy Mayor Nick Paulakis, Mayor Jim Restucci, Council Member Theresa Hancock. (Photo Courtesy of Bruce Ricks)
Public safety will again be on the agenda when the Council meets for a workshop this coming Monday, February 7 at 6:30 PM. This time the city has posted the agenda for the council meeting online. Despite the failure to do this for this past Monday’s meeting, a large crowd still showed up to hear the discussion. Most of the seats were full, as evidenced by these photos submitted to this blog by a member of the audience.
The Special Meeting On Public Safety Drew a Big Crowd (Photo Courtesy of Bruce Ricks)
The Council was briefed on recommendations from the Subcommittee on Pubic Safety, which recommends the following actions items:
- Hire a Crime Analyst
- Fill the city’s vacant IT Position so law enforcement will have support for its information systems and technology
- Create a Gang Task Force within the Sunnyside Police Department
- Annexation of Problem Properties (some gang activity is just outside the city limits, and beyond the reach of our code enforcement officer)
- Purchase Additional Automatic License Plate Readers
- Dedicate City Attorney time to assisting law enforcement on gang related issues
- Review space needs at Law and Justice Center to ensure adequate office space for new personnel
Facing Forward With Backs To Audience, Police Chief Radder and Deputy Chief Schenck Brief Council (Photo Courtesy of Bruce Ricks)
The gang suppression strategy devised by the Council’s Subcommittee on Public Safety will require an investment of significant resources in order to be effective. Escalating violence, which increasingly includes guns, must be met with a strong law enforcement response. The proposed strategy of the public safety committee needs to be approved in full, or it may be unworkable. It is important for the City Council to followup these discussions and workshops with some action.
Related Articles
- How Yakima County Deputies Can Give Sunnyside Police A Powerup (blogsunnyside.com)
About Jason R. Raines
Eagle Watch
jimsweb.net
I apologize in advance if some of this is either repetitive or non-germane, as I am not from the Yakima Valley area, but as someone with experience in allocating limited assets in intelligence-driven tasks, I have some comments on your seven recommendations.
The first one confuses me. Does a lot of your gang activity present as something other than gang activity? Does Sunnyside experience a disproportionate fraction of unsolved crime? Would an additional detective or two (for the same money as a specialist) do as good or better?
I wholeheartedly agree with the second recommendation. Any serious undertaking these days should exploit information technology to the maximum; if for no other reason than to make day-to-day office work as efficient as possible (so as to free up assets for actual criminal investigation and processing). A gifted programmer is also worth his weight in intelligence-driven undertakings.
Task forces can be useful, but their natural tendency is to manage problems rather than to solve them. A task force is, above all, a layer of bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are self-sustaining entities that require strong, apolitical or non-partisan leadership to actually accomplish their task.
The annexation of adjacent property bothers me from the standpoint of adding admittedly non-productive real estate to the city’s balance sheet. All cost, no revenue. If the bulk of gang activity is “based” in these areas, work with the relevant jurisdiction (all property belongs to somebody).
I’m not familiar with automatic license plate readers, so any comment on my part would be too far afield.
Again, the assigning of the city attorney’s time allocation requires a rather fine-grained knowledge of how they spend their time now, and what shortcomings in gang-related prosecutions are being experienced now. I assume that whoever is in charge of this office is aware of the success/failure rates of the various flavors of crime that office handles. If not, I’m not sure direction from city hall will help.
The last one regarding office space is reasonable, but must be taken into account as an additional front-end cost of new hiring, and added into the cost/benefit analysis of that new hiring. I’m assuming that Sunnyside is experiencing the same general cash-flow problems most jurisdictia are going through these days.
Overall, these seem well-targeted to extant problems, but I’m ever suspicious of any multipronged “answer” that needs to be taken in whole or not at all. A cash-strapped city needs to be able to adopt those suggestions that are both promptly effective and affordable. It seems to me that these could be prioritized and phased-in, judging their effectiveness on-the-fly.
I realize that unsolicited advice is hardly ever welcome, and if offered by “outsiders”, even less so. Just some thoughts from a reader that has battled similar asset allocation demons. For what’s it’s worth.
Eagle Watch,
I appreciate your comment and will address at least some of your points:
The task force is necessary as our city typically only has four police officers on duty at one time (sometimes less). They spend much of their shift answering calls and can not devote time to doing proactive police work. Dedicating a couple of officers to tackle what is a most pressing problem should help this situation.
The annexation of adjacent property is unfortunately going to be necessary in order to stop certain problem locations. These properties are in Yakima County, which is about to layoff more deputies. The Sheriff recently told some area residents they should get guns (translation: you are on your own).
Regarding the attorneys, it must be noted that one prominent DEFENSE attorney in our city suggested that we use civil code infractions to legally abate problem properties. His suggestion was to keep up the legal pressure to the point that the city will start bulldozing gang houses (following legal procedures). The fact that this is being promoted by a Defense Lawyer is noteworthy. The people that live in this city will either rise to the challenge of this problem, or accept it as a way of life. In my view, the problem needs to be addressed with strong leadership from the City Council on down. In order to do some of these things, the police will need dedicated time from the city’s attorneys to keep the pressure on the bad guys. Even if they are not in jail, they could lose their home. That would send a strong message to those that want to commit drive-by shootings (we are experiencing some evenings when we have a half-dozen or more such incidents). There are other activities where attorney time will be beneficial as well, but this is just one aspect as to why the police are asking for extra help from the attorneys.
I realize I have not addressed the requested crime analyst position, but I will do so in due time (probably with a post devoted to the subject). I appreciate your interest in these issues.
Pingback: Mayor Insulting A Man’s Professional Experience Is Uncalled For « BLOGSUNNYSIDE