The American: So tell me about the survey that you started last week. Chief Daniel Isom: We want to survey the public to get some feedback on how we are performing as an agency.
We hired Wilson Research Strategies to sample 900 residents of the city, divided between the nine police districts, with 100 in each.
We are asking questions like: How safe do you feel in your home? How safe do you feel in your neighborhood? How safe do you feel in St. Louis? What quality of service do you get when you call 911 or the local station? We’ll ask them about our crime prevention strategies and if they believe they are working on any level.
I believe we have to assess where we are in the opinion of the public to better serve their needs.
American: How much will it cost, and how did you budget the money?
Isom: It costs $26,000. We budgeted it from Asset Forfeiture.
This involves the third area of our strategic plan, which is looking at changes in how we manage our business more effectively, strategies for managing crime, and the third area is managing our relationship with the community.
American: Do you think the S&H Towing scandal has damaged your relationship with the community?
Isom: I look at the towing incident as one of the most significant things to happen to the police department in a long time. Certainly, it did raise questions.
This administration is trying to be as open as possible and doing the best we can to provide the best service possible and cooperate with federal investigators, and hopefully that will be concluded soon and we can move on.
But I still believe the majority of the police department, officers and civilians, work extremely hard and do their best job to protect the city, and we will deal with those who do not show that level of professionalism and integrity.
American: Have you been in touch with (former Police Chief Joe) Mokwa, to facilitate the transfer of power?
Isom: No. I’ll just give a simple “no” on that.
American: How are you managing your department’s money with the City’s budget crunch?
Isom: Last year we received $148 million from the City, and this year we received $148 million. Of course, costs rise every year, so this year that same amount of money doesn’t pay for the same services it paid for last year. Insurance costs have gone up, I believe by $2 million. We had to replace some cars, that was $2 million. The computers in our cars are aging, that’s $2 million.
When we do our math and adjust our budget, that means we are only able to pay 1,300 officers. Last year we were able to pay $1,400. That hurts. The good thing is, we came in looking for areas to put officers back on the street. We put 100 officers back on the street and hope to put 200 on the street, so the impact of losing people won’t be as severe.
Also, there is a lot of stimulus money available to cover the gap. We applied for four different grants to cover those areas, plus we added some other things. All totaled, we are asking for $15 million of stimulus money. We had asked for $168 million from the City, and we got $148 million. That’s a $20 million deficit. So that $15 million would go a long way toward getting us back up to the amount we felt we needed.
American: A lot of people will want to know what you are doing to fight back the crime on the streets.
Isom: We started moving additional officers back out into the neighborhoods. I am trying to foster a more community policing structure, moving people out into the districts, working on problems particular to that neighborhood.
We recently trained and just transferred this week a Special Operations Team in every area: North, Central and South. Those Special Operations Teams are working on aggravated assaults, shootings, robberies, narcotics and vice. The most recent murder-suicide, there was a Special Operations Team working on that block on Newberry Terrace, investigating narcotics. They were actively engaged when they discovered the murder-suicide. As disturbing as that is, it shows they were in the place where they were supposed to be.
We also have a Violent Offenders Program, a collaboration between the police department and all the federal agencies. I have been reading the daily reports, and they are bringing in the people I envisioned them bringing in – murders, assaults, gang members – the worst of the worst.
I also want to target gang members and move them off the streets. I have been telling the U.S. Attorney’s Office to pay the same attention to gangs as they pay to organized crime. Why can’t it be replicated? These are not big criminal networks, they are small criminal networks. I think they bought into that.
American: Some black cops feel there is a health disparity issue in the fitness exam, since African Americans tend to have higher blood pressure.
Isom: The fitness test controversy cuts across racial lines. You might be impacted if you are African-American because of blood pressure issues, others because of weight, others from injuries in the past.
From my standpoint, it is important that an officer have some level of fitness to perform on the job. You are going to be engaged in physical confrontations, running up steps, rolling on the ground, and if you are not physically capable of doing that – if you have high blood pressure or a heart problem – and you will be putting your life in jeopardy, then it’s important for you as an individual and us as an agency to know. It is our job to protect people, and if you are not physically capable of doing that, then you can’t help us do our job as an agency.
If someone feels or is told by their doctor that they can’t take our fitness test because of high blood pressure, then maybe they shouldn’t be in these high-pressure situations. It’s not an issue of race, it’s about personal health and the ability to protect the citizens.
