Police Chief Roberta Simms told the city council Wednesday that Lowertown's community policing initiative has driven a measurable drop in violent crime and improved resident trust in the department, even as she cautioned that staffing shortages threaten to slow further progress.
Simms presented council members with data showing violent crime in Lowertown down 19 percent over the past two years, a period that coincides with the department’s shift toward assigning dedicated neighborhood officers who walk regular beats and attend monthly community meetings rather than responding only to dispatched calls. Average response times for non-emergency calls in the district have also improved, from just under 22 minutes to roughly 15 minutes, according to the department’s figures.
“When we started this, a lot of people in Lowertown told us, politely and not so politely, that they’d seen policing initiatives come and go before and none of them stuck,” Simms told the council. “Two years in, I think the numbers show this one is different, but I don’t want to stand here and claim victory when the work is nowhere near finished.”
Residents notice, cautiously
Council Member Terrence Boudreaux, who represents Lowertown and has pushed the department to expand the program, said constituents had begun to describe a different relationship with patrol officers. “I’ve had people tell me they know their beat officer’s name now, which was not something I heard two years ago,” Boudreaux said. “That doesn’t fix everything wrong in Lowertown, but it’s a real change, and I’d be doing my constituents a disservice if I didn’t say so.”
I’ve lived on this block for thirty years and buried too many neighbors to overdoses and to violence. I still don’t trust police the way some people think I should. But I will say the officer who walks our street now actually stops and talks to people instead of just driving past, and that’s different than it used to be.
Odell Marsh, Lowertown Resident
Simms credited part of the improvement to closer coordination with Wayfinder Recovery Services, whose expanded outpatient programs and Lowertown sober-living facility have given officers a place to refer people experiencing addiction-related crises rather than defaulting to arrest. Donna Wysocki, Wayfinder’s executive director, said the partnership had matured considerably since the department first began referring clients roughly three years ago, around the same period county overdose deaths have fallen for a third straight year.
“The officers who work this beat now call us directly instead of just running someone through the system,” Wysocki said. “That’s not something I would have predicted five years ago, and I think it’s part of why both sets of numbers, ours and the department’s, are moving in the same direction.”
Staffing shortage clouds the picture
Simms cautioned that the department’s roughly two dozen vacant officer positions threaten to limit how far the community policing model can expand into Cedar Hollow, where residents have asked for a similar dedicated-beat approach. “I’d like to extend exactly this model to Cedar Hollow tomorrow,” Simms said. “I don’t have the officers to do it without pulling coverage from somewhere else, and that’s the honest constraint I’m working under.”
Council Member Gary Petrowski, who represents Cedar Hollow, said he had raised the same concern during recent budget hearings and would keep pushing for the expansion. “My constituents have watched Lowertown get a program that’s working and they’re asking, reasonably, when it’s their turn,” Petrowski said. “I don’t want the answer to be never because we can’t fill vacancies.”
Council President Walter Kowalczyk asked Simms whether the recently approved $1.2 million mental-health co-response pilot, funded as part of this year’s city budget, would ease some of the pressure on patrol officers in Lowertown. Simms said she expected the pilot to help but described it as a complement to community policing rather than a substitute for adequate staffing. “Co-response handles a specific kind of call well,” she said. “It doesn’t replace an officer who knows a neighborhood well enough to head off a problem before it becomes a call in the first place.”
Simms said her department would present a formal proposal for extending the community policing model to Cedar Hollow once the current recruiting class graduates from the academy in several months. Until then, she said, Lowertown’s beat officers would remain the department’s primary test case for the approach. “I’d rather prove this works with the resources I have than promise something citywide I can’t deliver yet,” Simms said.
Boudreaux said he planned to press the department for a public dashboard tracking response times and crime data by neighborhood, arguing that Lowertown’s progress should be measured continuously rather than presented once a year in a single council briefing. “I appreciate getting this report,” he said. “I’d appreciate it more if residents could check these numbers themselves without waiting for an annual presentation.” Simms said her staff was reviewing what data could be published without compromising ongoing investigations.
Marsh said he remained skeptical that the gains would hold if the department’s staffing problems worsen. “Programs like this live or die on whether the same officer is still walking this block in two years,” he said. “I’ve seen good ideas in this neighborhood get funded for a year and then quietly disappear once the budget gets tight again. I want to believe this is different, but I’ve been asked to believe that before.”