[BoulderCouncilHotline] Re: Questions regarding our police

[Doelling, Kady]

Hi Lisa - thank you for your questions; we are prepared to respond to them tonight.

Kady

Kady Doelling
Executive Budget Officer
[cid:image001.png at 01D58370.290D9730]
O: 303-441-1848
C: 720-724-6409
doellingk at bouldercolorado.gov<mailto:doellingk at bouldercolorado.gov>

Finance Department
1136 Alpine | Boulder, CO 80304
www.bouldercolorado.gov<http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/>

From: Morzel, Lisa <MorzelL at bouldercolorado.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2019 12:23 PM
To: Council <council at bouldercolorado.gov>; Weinheimer, Carey <WEINHEIMERC at bouldercolorado.gov>; Brautigam, Jane <BrautigamJ at bouldercolorado.gov>; HOTLINE <HOTLINE at bouldercolorado.gov>
Subject: Questions regarding our police

 Dear Council members and Jane

 Tonight we will be discussing the 2020 budget and I will share one comment regarding the front door request by council.

The front door on the Muni building. This has been a priority for council members as voted on in 2019 as well as in 2018.   I have raised this issue for many years initially as a front door issue that the city requires of all buildings yet the city is not following its own rules.
Later with the new sister city plaza installed (the city has spent up to $2MM on this beautiful investment), a front door was seen as a way to activate the plaza. Now the plaza has been taken over daily and nightly with a small group of individuals who hang there for many hours with many of them smoking marijuana or injecting drugs and leaving syringes in the shrubs (see front page of Daily Camera Friday October 12 that has a large photo of service worker collecting a syringe in shrubs at the Plaza).  The presence of this small group is intimidating for potential visitors and is dangerous for our police officers.

While I appreciate staff willingness to help improve the aesthetics of the Plaza, this does nothing to actually activate the Plaza and help disperse some of the people who habitually hang out there on a daily and nightly basis, while many are doing drugs with no recrimination and just contributes to a festering problem city staff is well aware of is occurring.  I feel the $90k proposal is just throwing money at the problem and will do nothing or very little to ACTIVATE this area.

At our meeting last week, our city manager said maybe we could hire private security to make the Plaza safer which made me question why we would not ask that more police officers, who are highly trained, be posted there.  In asking some questions about our current police force and their ability to do more enforcement or have more presence, I have heard that currently our police department is operating under constrained conditions.  I ask the following questions:

A.  Over the past 20 years given the rate of growth in Boulder in general and in our overall homeless population, how many officers has the city added to our police force?

B. How many officers are currently on the ground during a regular shift?  What would be the optimal number to have staffed?  How has that changed since the late 1990's and has that kept pace with the overall growth in general population and in the homeless population?

C. I have also heard that on any given day, we are down about 30 officers, due to different types of leave (annual, medical, maternity/paternity, etc.). A case in point is our current Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) where one officer is on leave for medical purposes making the entire HOT team not being on the street.  Council recently learned there are no backup officers for HOT. Why not?

D. My final question regarding officers on the street is should we add additional officers to improve safety in Boulder? And should we consider allocating more in our current budget?

 I understand that the police will be updating their master plan in the near future and that they will be making recommendations at that time but I am concerned about morale in the current police department as well as do we have sufficient number of police officers on the streets?

Thanks

Lisa

Lisa Morzel
Member of the Boulder City Council
303-815-6723
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