I’ve got questions

Last night, in support of the Nebraska pork industry, I grilled a pair of thick bone-in chops. As I was enjoying the meats of my labor, we were also watching the President's 100-day news conference. Fork on the pork, ear on the tube, something caught my attention: the President recognized a reporter, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, for a question.

That name was familiar. That face looks vaguely familiar, too. Could Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times be the same Jeff Zeleny of the Daily Nebraskan, who covered the police beat for the UNL student newspaper around 1994 or so? And how on earth do I remember this minutia, when I commonly forget the name of someone I've just been introduced to 20 seconds earlier?

I’m guessing the Jeff Zeleny in the nice suit seated in the East Room at a White House press conference is the same guy who 15 years ago in jeans and t-shirt was in Sgt. Ann Heermann’s cramped office getting the low-down on the overnight mayhem in Lincoln. I sent off an email to the address available for Jeff Zeleny on the Times website. Do you think I’ll get a response?

Mr. Zeleny's question of President Obama:

“During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?”

The President had to write the four-parter down, which drew a good laugh. Is it just me, or did that sound like a question from The Dating Game? Am I dating myself by bringing up The Dating Game?

From the 1891 blotter

Last Friday, I blogged about my discovery of the great story of the John Sheedy murder from 1891, courtesy of University of Nebraka historian Dr. Timothy Mahoney and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Back at police headquarters, we went digging in the blotters, and found some of the original entries from the day of the assault, Sunday, January 11th, 1891.

Here’s the original dispatch report, where at 7:25 PM Officer Malone is sent to Sheedy’s residence at the southeast corner of 12th and P Streets (click these to enlarge):

A mere 40 minutes later, he’s back at HQ with the details, accompanied by his sergeant. This struck me as strange at first, but it was just three blocks from Sheedy's to the police station, and shoe leather would be a pretty effective means of communications, given the alternatives available.

Chief Melick and Officer Malone bring in the suspect (Mr. Monday McFarland) on the following Saturday night around 10:30 PM:

Six for six

Friday morning’s robbery of the Union Bank branch at 48th and Normal Blvd. turned out to be the big event of the week. I’m sure it will be on Officer Brian Ward’s list of career highlights. I thought that clearing this string of burglaries with four arrests would be the big story of the week, but that got a bit overshadowed.

The digital footprints got the burglars, but an alert citizen was the key to the bank robbery. The citizen (I’m not sure he wants to be publicly identified, so I’ll just refer to him as Chuck) saw the suspect run out the door and dash to a nearby car. Thinking that odd, he followed and phoned 911. Yes, indeed, there had just been a robbery. Chuck vectored patrol cars in about a half mile away, at Normal Blvd. and South Street, and after a short pursuit the arrest was made.

Chuck was sitting in the lobby of the police station a few minutes later, waiting to give a statement to an investigator, when he received a bearhug and a high five from the chief of police. Wow, it just amazes me sometimes how citizens help us out. Talk about community policing!

The Lincoln Journal Star did a nice article about the recent trend in bank robberies. This is a low-yield crime in Lincoln, I’d say. Take the “by the clock” link to a neat roll-over map.

I used to drop my daughter off at the bank where this robbery occurred, one of the several Union Bank branches where she worked in college. Son, too, a few years earlier. I take an especially dim view of bank robbery for personal reasons. Both of my children are still in banking, Kelly at the SAC Federal Credit Union in Omaha, TJ here in Lincoln at Union Bank. I enjoyed calling them both on Friday evening to, well, gloat.

Cool interactive map

Not to mention a fine bit of writing, an excellent website design, a great story, an intriguing mystery, and a good example of a mostly-law-abiding citizen using a concealed handgun to defend himself right here in Lincoln.

It’s all here, at Gilded Age Plains City, a remarkable web site built around UNL historian Timothy R. Mahoney’s 2001 article, The Great Sheedy Murder Case and the Booster Ethos of the Gilded Age in Lincoln, Nebraska.

I have a lifelong passion for history, and own several Lincoln history books. How I missed this I do not know, but a colleague, Capt. Joy Citta stumbled upon it, and sent me the link. The story features two of my predecessors as chief of police, Samuel Melick and James Malone. It’s a great read, and I was blown away and the design and execution of the website, with back stories, biographies, a document archive, and a timeline.

Readers of the Chief’s Corner also know that I’ve got a thing for geography and cartography, so I enjoyed the map. You can zoom way in for great detail.

I have seen this beautiful birds-eye view of Lincoln in 1889 before, but what really knocked my socks off was the interactive version, where many individual buildings and address are identified with a rollover, and the information box displays a period photograph, where available. My congratulations to the project team that put this all together.

Whadda ya think?

We’re back in the throes of City budget preparation, a process that seems to last from December to August. Like cities nationwide, the challenges are immense given the recession. Lincoln is staring at a multi-million dollar gap between our projected revenues for fiscal year 2009-2010 and the expenditures needed to maintain the current level of service. Something’s got to give: either more revenue (unlikely) or more cuts.

This follows two particularly lean years in city government where over 100 jobs were cut. The less painful medicine has already been taken, now the bitter pills await. All City departments were tasked with submitting a budget that is 91% of their current FY 2008-2009 budget. Since cost escalate about 3%, meeting a 91% budget really means cutting to 88%.

Since our budget is primarily personnel costs, you can do a rough calculation of what this means by multiplying our 417 employees by 12%. Whether such drastic cuts really occur is another matter, but I have been warned by the budget staff that it will be nigh-on-to-impossible to balance the City books if the public safety agencies (police, fire, 911) are taken off the table, since they account for the biggest chunk of the tax-funded portion of the City budget.

When you’re in my position, you’ve got to at least think about and plan for how you would handle cuts, if they happen. The process is rather straightforward: you look around at all the activities and programs your department is engaged in, and you compare these to out mission—providing police services that promote a safe and secure community. Enforcing traffic laws has a significant impact on safety. Investigating child abuse and neglect has a big impact on safety, crime prevention efforts and problem-oriented policing projects aimed at burglary reduction has an impact of security, and so forth.

Parking enforcement, conversely—though it may have important purposes and value—has virtually no relation to our mission of promoting safety and security. The contribution of traffic direction at special events to safety and security is debatable. And what does the investigation of traffic crashes—a major consumer of police resources—contribute to safety and security? A bit, perhaps, but not very much.

The Mayor and I had just this discussion last year, and he was intrigued. I told him that traffic crashes are one of life’s minor crises, and that we make these less painful for citizens. We help them get wreckers, notify family members, gather the information from the other driver they’re going to need, ensuring that he or she has a license, isn’t drunk, and has insurance (or issue citations for these offenses. We also do crash a investigation that often leads to a ticket for a moving violation, and always produces a detailed report, which makes it much easier for insurance companies to evaluate and settle claims.

We could, however, produce the former (help with wrecker, make sure drivers exchange information, evaluate for suspended license-drunk driving-no insurance) without producing the later (the detailed investigation and the investigator’s report.) This would take your typical fender bender from over an hour down to about 30 minutes or so. If you do the math, that’s somewhere between two and three officers in person-hours. If we were to lose personnel, my goal will be to keep the workload of our staff manageable, so they can continue to do what remains with quality. I want to drop the least important services, so the effort can be focused on the most important work.

This is exactly what we have done in previous down cycles. Off the top of my head, we no longer escort funerals, investigate traffic crashes on private property, assist with money transfers, unlock cars, go with the Fire Department to all medical emergencies, respond to barking dogs, teach DARE, provide school resource officers to elementary schools, or investigate gas drive-offs with no suspects. That’s several thousand police dispatches annually that we would have been making in 1989 that we aren’t making in 2009. So, what’s next? Would traffic crash investigation be a logical choice?

The City is engaged in a survey to gauge what citizens think about several of the cuts that are under consideration. I’d like to get my own sense, though, from readers of the Chief’s Corner. How would you feel if you were rear-ended, we helped get things organized at the scene, but we didn’t take statements, do measurements, evaluate cause, or produce an investigator’s report? Is my thought process sound in ranking this as only marginally related to our core mission (particularly in comparison to other police activities?)

Historic photographs

Last week, I blogged about the availability of a great archive of Annual Reports stretching back to 1904. Thanks to the help of our interns, who work for free, these documents are not only preserved, but made available to the general public on the web.

That not all the interns in the Management Services Unit have been up to, though. We’ve also been collecting, organizing, and scanning historic photographs of the police department and its personnel. While the archive is huge, we’ve begun to post some representative photos on our public website.

This will continue to grow, as time and volunteers allow. We’d like to have a few picks from each decade. The links to the decades are up at the top of the page on our short History of the Lincoln Police Department. Enjoy.

Virtual buildings

I am a member of the Geospatial Technical Working Group at the Department of Justice. This is a group of about 20 police practitioners from around the county who are advising the National Institute of Justice on what kinds of research and development needs exist for geospatial technology in criminal justice (think crime mapping and analysis.)

One of the topics I'm interested in on this panel is tools and techniques to assist in emergency preparedness and response. As a simple example, we load a digital map application in all our mobile data computers in patrol cars. In the right kind of circumstances, an officer can launch a detailed map of Lincoln, zoom in and out, turn layers on and off--such as streets, parks, schools, parcels, address labels, and even excellent aerial photos that will identify the wading pool in the backyard. Select a tool on the toolbar, click a school, and a site plan and detailed floor plan of each level of the school is launched in a browser window.

As useful as this might be on a bad day, it's still just a flat two-dimensional building. This is going to change. The image below is a mock-up of Adobe's office complex in San Jose, CA. Click the image to launch the application, built with scalable vector graphics (you might need the Adobe .svg viewer plug-in to open this). After the app opens, roll over the building, and different floors are highlighted. Click a floor, and it's floor plan opens, roll over an office, and it's occupant and the phone number are revealed. That's one fancy building directory!

Now click on the photo below, an image of the great hall of the Nebraska State Capitol from a Lincoln firm, roundus.com that I discovered a couple years ago. Use your mouse to tour around, up and down. It's incredible in full-screen, so look for that link at the bottom right of the panorama.

These are relatively straightforward and effective commercial applications of off-the-shelf technologies. Makes one wonder what the future will bring. Think about combining either of these with Google's StreetView. Come to think of it, Google Earth's GigaPan photos combine several of these concepts: map, 3D, panoramic photos, and navigation.

These technologies and concepts have some intriguing possibilities in emergency management. It will be interesting to see what the future brings.

Life in cities

Scroll down to the third snippet in this column from the Lincoln Journal Star, headed "Thanks for towing us." Usually, when people come back at find their vehicle missing, the police department is where they call looking for it. One of our Service Desk employees thought this story of three vans being towed sounded familiar. We have an informal agreement with the various companies who tow for private property owners: they'll normally call us and let us know the location and the vehicle description, so when we get the stolen car report, we can tell the owner where to find it. We maintain a written log of these calls, so we can help reunite owners with their steads.

Our employee recalls the conversation, and the log shows that these vehicles were towed from the private parking lot of a downtown motel, which is posted for guest parking only. She also recalls that one of the owners who called the police department looking for the lost van related that someone at the business had told them not to park there (apparently it was more than once) and warned them that they would be towed. They just didn't think it would really happen.

I'm sorry their visit was marred. I'm sure the tow bill makes was stiff. Dadgummit. But it had nothing at all to do with the police or with the City of Lincoln. I don't know about you, but I thought this article at least implied that it was thugs in our employ who had dragged these vans away while the owners were busy stimulating the local economy.

The tale of parking woes is a recurring theme in my mailbox. I have a little sympathy for someone who overstays a metered parking spot to linger over dessert. That's why out-of-town plates can remit two freebies annually. At $10 a pop, a Lincoln parking ticket isn't exactly going to cause the children to go unshod all winter, either. I wonder what would have happened to my rental car if I just parked it in a posted private lot in downtown San Diego on my trip a couple weeks ago, or what would become of it if I had left it on a city street in a no parking zone a couple blocks from Petco Park?