Power Lunch: Chief outlines new policies, gets earful on curfew, cameras

Police Chief Ken Burton said the department plans to expand its new geographic policing system by establishing physical precincts around the city, much like the “experimental” downtown precinct based in the Special Business District offices.

Burton, who came from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to take the job in Columbia seven months ago, also said he supports the establishment of a curfew and is neutral on a proposal to place surveillance cameras downtown, two issues that sparked debate during the CBT’s lunch forum on crime Oct. 14.

Overall, Burton said the best way to describe the department’s emerging policing policy is “getting back to the community” by changing the organization to allow police officers to take active roles in their assigned neighborhoods.

The goal, he said, is move away from an “us vs. them kind of attitude” and to create relationships with the people they police.

“My wife says it best,” Burton said. “When we came to Columbia, she said police officers here don’t wave. My wife is from Texas, and some of you have met her, and she’s definitely from Texas. And she’s made it her personal mission to make police officers wave to her. It’s kinda embarrassing sometimes because they recognize who I am, and they see this crazy lady in the passenger side doing this, and she makes them wave to her. But she knows how I feel about police officers being part of the community they serve.”

Burton said four recently promoted captains and lieutenants will be “de facto police chiefs for their areas.”

“We cover 65 square miles in the city of Columbia, and we’re working out of a central police station,” Burton said. “Very early on it became obvious to me that we’re spread way too thin.”

Burton said he has met with the city’s public works and planning directors about locations for substations and added that a fire station would be one good candidate.

The department also is moving toward a policy of having officers respond to calls only when they’re dispatched rather than responding when they hear a “hot call” on their radios or in the station.

“That’s not how you can police a city of this size,” Burton said. “And that should scare you. When you think about it, something happens on the far southwest of the city, and all of us are there, and you live on the north side, and something happens on the north side — you’re not going to have help very close by.”

Special Business District Director Carrie Gartner said the downtown unit based in their offices, consisting of a sergeant and six officers, is “just fantastic. There is so much more of a regular, day-to-day interaction.”

Burton said he was confident the experiment that started in May would work, though “a lot of people were skeptical (about) taking all these resources and putting them downtown.”

They were directed to take a more proactive approach to downtown crime. Burton said: “I told our officers who work downtown: ‘I want you to walk into every single business. I want you to find out what business they’re in, who owns it, who manages it. I want you to find out what the police can do to make their business better.”

Karen Taylor, a Boone County National Bank executive who founded Keep Columbia Safe after her 25-year-old son was beaten and robbed in a parking garage, said downtown would be safer if the city installed surveillance cameras and established a late-night curfew.

(In September, the organization started a petition drive to place an initiative on the April 2010 ballot that would support the purchase and placement of downtown cameras.)

“Downtown is too critical, and a few incidents like what happened to my son, that will shut down people from coming downtown,” Taylor said.

Richard Hicks, Boone County’s assistant prosecutor, said he believes a curfew would help prevent crime and added that it could have prevented the 12:15 p.m. assault on Adam Taylor because it allows officers to take young teenagers off the streets.

“The nighttime curfew is a no brainer,” Burton said. “What is there for a 14- or 15-year-old kid to be on the streets of doing at 11 p.m.? Nothing.”

But three participants in the forum, council members Barbara Hoppe, Jerry Wade and Nathan Stephens, an MU administrator and member of a crime prevention task force, questioned the perception that downtown crime has increased and the implementation of policies based on possible misperception.

“I don’t believe there has been an increase in crime in Columbia,” Stephens said. “What I do believe is that crime has spread out … to segments of the city that haven’t experienced much crime.”

Wade said data he has seen suggests that the crime rate in Columbia has changed little in the past 10 years. “We have created a perception that is not like reality,” he said.

Wade also said he opposes the installation of surveillance cameras downtown. In an e-mail, First Ward Councilman Paul Sturtz wrote that surveillance cameras are not very effective and raise privacy concerns.

Hoppe said some elderly constituents at a public safety forum she held recently said they feel safe coming downtown and “are concerned about getting accurate information out so we don’t scare people from coming downtown.”

Hoppe also asked Burton to check into whether there have been late-night curfews established in a college towns like Columbia and how successful they’ve been. She’s concerned about MU students who look younger than their actual age getting stopped by police repeatedly.

“It’s our job,” Burton said, “to make sure it’s not abused.”

Power Lunch Participants:

• Ken Burton, Chief of Police, Columbia Police Department
• Tom Dresner, Deputy Chief of Police, Columbia Police Department
• Carrie Gartner, Director, Columbia Special Business District
• Jessica Haden, Public Information Officer, Columbia Police Department
• Richard Hicks, Assistant Prosecutor, Boone County
• Barbara Hoppe, 6th Ward Representative, Columbia City Council
• Jeff Jones, Director of Sales, The Callaway Bank
• Debbie LaRue, Director of Marketing and P.R., The Callaway Bank
• Gary Meyerpeter, President of Boone County Market, The Callaway Bank
• Kurt Mirtsching, Member, Central Columbia Association Board
• David Tyson Smith, Attorney, Citizen Review Board proponent
• Nathan Stephens, Director, Black Culture Center, MU
• Karen Taylor, Senior V.P. Retail, Boone County National Bank
• Jerry Wade, 4th Ward Representative, Columbia City Council