Nick Jimenez

Major change comes slowly in the city

Almost two years ago, a team of police experts said that Corpus Christi's style of police work was good, but outmoded. The police force was too wedded to the old style of hierarchy, the International Association of Chiefs of Police said after going over the local force.
   What was needed, the top cops said, was to decentralize the police force, set up substations around the city, and staff each of them with commanders who could react quickly and dispatch officers as needed.
   That kind of law enforcement is called community policing. The substations are key because they would be close to residents who could walk in and make reports of trouble, both big and small. Police at the substations would work closely with residents. They would come to know a neighborhood's rhythms and know when something wasn't quite right, just like neighbors know to call 911 when "movers" are hauling TVs and appliances from next door because they know no one in that house is moving.
   Two years later, the police force is still basically housed down at the main headquarters on Chaparral Street. The patrols form up there, the police chief and all his commanders are there, and all the police officers report for work down there.
   Why hasn't community policing happened?
   To hear the main players involved, everybody wants it. Police Chief Pete Alvarez has said he is committed to community policing. Mayor Loyd Neal is behind it and so is City Manager David Garcia.
   The slooooow pace of change in the police department is really an example of how hard it is to change a big organization. And the difficulty in implementing what is recognized as a "good thing" ought to be a caution to City Council candidates now on the campaign trail.
   There hardly breathes a candidate who isn't ready to bring some kind of reform to City Hall. Is there a challenger, or even an incumbent, who doesn't want a leaner, more efficient, less expensive city government that is still responsive to every call of every constituent?
   But there's a big gap between campaign sign and council seat and making all those promises happen.
   Community policing, for example, ran into trouble almost from the beginning. Those substations, not surprisingly, cost money. The council dropped the substations from last November's bond package. Putting them on the bond package would take too long, they said.
   For now, community policing is a good idea, but it hasn't happened yet. Just like privatization hasn't happened yet. The council has gone right up to the brink of privatizing some functions of the city, but no cigar yet.
   I don't know that privatization, or even community policing, would in the end be the right way to go for the city. And the cost to do either means big bucks. The chief hurdle to putting some city functions out for bid is simply the price of preparing the material; the staff told the council last year it would take about $1 million to do the preparation work.
   But in the end I suspect that it's not money or effort that stops those major steps from being taken. It's simply that too much is invested in doing things the old way.
   The cops probably like going down to the police station every day and don't look forward to going out to police outposts. People generally don't want their jobs changed. City employees, like any employee, including myself, don't like everything about their jobs, but they sure as heck like them better than the way someone else is going to change them.
   And politicians are human. Change means pain for them, too. People complain. They make phone calls. Reformist zeal withers in the face of obstinacy and inertia. People say yes, but their actions say no.
   City Council candidates are never about the status quo. They want to be the captains who steer a new course. But big ships change course very slowly.
  

 
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