During a city Public Safety Committee meeting Monday, Police Chief Andy Mills unveiled early plans on how to further drive down those calls.
“Yesterday, I saw a person reporting that he responded to a call of a person dancing in the rain,” Mills told the committee, comprised of Mayor David Terrazas and Councilwomen Cynthia Chase and Richelle Noroyan. “That is why we’re allowing sergeants to screen out calls officers are responding to.”
The department saw the nearly 27 percent reduction in the first three months of the year, to 17,630 calls, in the wake of a consultant’s report showing city officers’ workload-to-population ratio was much higher than many cities Santa Cruz’s size. Arrests, on the other hand, were up nearly 12 percent in the same period, department statistics show.
Some of the call reduction, Mills said, comes as the department stops counting calls to which his officers do not actually respond, but were recorded as a call.
Mills said he is hoping, with the community’s help, to reduce the department’s call load even further, by filtering out low-priority calls from the 911 emergency line.
“We have trained people here for years here, countywide, to pick up the phone and call 911 for everything,” Mills said. “The problem with that is that it builds a false expectation and it jams our 911 lines. And so, part of this is going to have to be a program countywide, not just us, to reeducate the community on what the 911 system is for and not overburden it with all kinds of other calls.”
Noroyan said she has heard confusion about the department’s prioritization of emergency calls since Mills began speaking about his new approach.
“So now they’re asking, what do I call about,” Noroyan said. “What I’ve told people is that until there’s a policy presented to the community and put in place is that we’re still pretty much in status quo right now. But, it would be nice to not call 911 if somebody’s singing badly on Pacific Avenue. That maybe we can start getting some standards.”
Mills, agreeing with Noroyan’s assessment, said he expects to form a community panel to further help separate types of emergency calls that rise to the top from lower priority issues, combining the feedback with input from officers, his Chief’s Advisory Panel and Santa Cruz Regional 9-1-1.
In the meantime, Mills described areas already considered low priority.
• Non-injury vehicle collisions, unless a person is suspected of being under the influence or there is a brawl to separate.
• Recyclables theft. Officers in the area will respond, but if none are nearby, they may not immediately be pulled off their beats.
• Illegal daytime camping on public property will be assigned to neighborhood policing teams.
• Panhandling, unless it occurs on road medians or is aggressive in nature.
Terrazas asked that police leave wiggle room for areas that see an uptick in crime patterns, or that are close to sensitive areas, such as schools. Chase said she was happy to see the department beginning to break down its types of calls for service.
“The point that Councilmember Noroyan makes regularly, which is that we get a lot of concerned citizens calling us with legitimate concerns and complaints that are not actually public safety related, but we don’t have a way to track that,” Chase said.
Mills said he hopes to set up a city phone line that callers with non-emergency issues can be transferred to and leave a message for later response. City Manager Martín Bernal said the city is aiming to establish by May a new online customer response system that will allow citizens to report non-emergency issues.
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