Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Ed Reiskin Supports Logan Circle

We received a report from Ed Reiskin's office, the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, on the action items they are currently implementing to build a stronger and safer Logan Circle community. Excerpts from the report are posted below.

Thanks to Deputy Mayor Reiskin and his staff for kicking into high gear for Logan!

Public Safety:

As I'm sure you know, MPD will be hosting an Operation Fight Back on November 16th starting at 10 a.m. I (Bradley Hicks) am planning to participate along with the Deputy Mayor's Chief of Staff. To address the increase in juvenile arrests in the area, the Deputy Mayor has discussed with the Director of Parks and Recreation (DPR), Kimberly Flowers, the need to replace the Roving Leader that was based at the Kennedy Recreation Center and who recently left his position.

I have heard that this individual played a key role in keeping the peace between youth from the neighborhoods of 5th and O and 7th and O. DPR expects the new Roving Leader to be on board this month. In the meantime, Bernard West, Roving Leader for Wards 1 and 2, will be deployed to the area.

Commander McCoy is keenly aware of the prostitution and drug issues in the neighborhood and has the 3D Focused Mission Unit on the drug problem, the PSA and MNB Prostitution Unit concentrating on the prostitution problem (early morning hours in surrounding alleys), and has placed the light tower in the vicinity of 10th and O sporadically to help disrupt the unwanted activities. MPD has also made a number of prostitution arrests in the past two weeks and Lt. Smith is planning a joint effort to shut down a club allegedly engaged in prostitution in the next week or so.

Further, as you probably are also aware, Chief Ramsey has created a Robbery Squad to address the robbery problem along with allowing additional overtime to be used by 3D to deploy additional resources during the hours when these robberies are occurring.

Regarding PSA 307 staffing, MPD provided our office with the following information on PSA staffing availability (Officers, Sergeants, and Lieutenants) as of September 9, 2005. Updated numbers will be provided to the Judiciary Committee at MPD's oversight hearing on November 10, 2005. You may contact Councilmember Phil Mendelson's office should you wish to testify as a public witness at the hearing.

Overall, MPD has 2,122 PSA personnel assigned to the PSAs, surpassing the staffing target of 2,067 personnel. Through the assignment of new recruits to the PSAs and a reduction in the percentage of members unavailable for full duty, MPD has increased the number of members available for full duty in the PSAs by 107 members (6%) over the past six months.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Will they address the issue of insufficient police vs the ever increasing number of residents in the Logan Circle area? Every new building that goes up increases our population tremendously but there has not been an equal increase in the police officers assigned to our area. Where are the tax dollars these new residents are paying going? Perhaps to our highly publicized surplus??

Anonymous said...

This is crap. I am happy that they are "keenly aware" and I am happy that they are putting together squads and commissions. Stop wasting your time telling us how great you are and get your people on the streets to catch these criminals. This is ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

When MPD changes the boundaries of the PSAs in May of 2004, the number of officers in the Third District doubled. The problem was that as the number of officers doubled, so did the area of land that they covered. 3D went from the smallest district to the largest. Every PSA got more officers, but also more area to patrol and answer to. No matter how you cut it, 3800 officers in the District is 3800, regardless of how many PSAs there are and how you try to sugar coat it to the community.