Is it safety or balanced budget?

Council unclear on budget's priorities
by Jennifer Greenup
QCFMag.com

Cincinnati City Council members are busy debating the budget; almost all of them believe that safety should be the top priority of the City after a balanced budget. All but one councilmember has endorsed a commitment to placing 100 more police officers on the streets, called for earlier this month by Councilman Chris Monzel.

Councilmember’s John Cranley, Cecil Thomas, Chris Bortz, Jeff Berding and Leslie Ghiz also submitted a motion calling on the City to add 100 new officers to city streets.
“There is no doubt that people have left our city over a perception of danger,” said Cranley. “If you go around and asking people if they want to see more officers on the street, they would say yes.”

Councilman David Crowley voted against the motion. “We just added 75 new police officers,” said Crowley. “There are many ways to fight crime. It seems the easy way to reduce crime by putting more police on the streets.” He continued, saying that the city could change the way they uses its 1047 police officers so that more of its officers would be on the street.

“Only 48 percent [502 officers] can respond to calls,” said Crowley. “That is low compared to other cities. We could change our rate to increase officers on the street."

Councilman John Cranley, however, pointed out that even if the City voted to add more officers to the department, it would be years before they were all added.

“It would be a miracle to get these officers on the streets by 2008,” said Cranley. “The bigger issue is that this is not a rush to hire.”

Thomas, a former police officer said that when he joined the department 30 years ago, there were 956 officers on the force. Since that time, the types of crimes and the amount of crime committed on the City’s streets has increased.

“We need to bring our police on line with the amount of crime on the streets,” said Thomas. “There is a new level of crime [on our streets] with 15 and 16 year-olds committing gun crimes.”

Mr. Crowley said the city needs to look at other ways to reduce crime that does not involve law enforcement which the other councilmember’s agreed with.

“We need to be proactive about attracting people to the City,” said Chris Bortz. “There are many challenges and selling this community as a place to do business is just as important as a safe City.”

Councilwoman Laketa Cole said that an increase in home ownership would help solve some of the City’s crime problems.

“I believe that while we are adding officers, we need to do other things to reduce crime,” said Cole. “If you have an increase in home ownership, you have a reduction in crime.”

However, while the city faces a large budget deficit and costly policies to improve the lives of the Cinicinnati’s residents, they are also debating rolling back the property taxes by $2 million dollars, a Monzel proposal. The rollback would save the average homeowner $9 a year according to Mr. Crowley.