Winter Park considers adding more police officers

Does Winter Park need more police officers?

A discussion broke out among City Commissioners on Monday about whether or not the city should unfreeze four positions in the Winter Park Police Department – a measure that might be needed to keep up with the city’s crime.

The talks surfaced during the city’s work session over the budget for the upcoming fiscal year when Commissioner Carolyn Cooper suggested that the city bring back the four positions in the police department frozen back in 2008.

“I’ve been getting phone calls from people off Aloma and Kings Way,” Cooper said. “There are a lot of people who are not feeling as safe as they used to feel. It can be perception and it can be reality…. They want to be safe at home.”

The four positions include two special operations officers, who respond to traffic crashes, and two street crimes officers, who do undercover work and narcotics investigations.

Police Chief Brett Railey said unfreezing the four positions – especially the special operations officers – would be helpful, as they would supplement the existing patrol officers.

“Last year we had 1,600 traffic crashes,” Railey said. “With Ultimate I-4 coming up, there are going to be additional crashes. There’s just no doubt about it.”

“Each of those crashes average just over an hour per crash [of an officer’s time]. If [special operations officers] aren’t available to work it, then one of my first responders in the patrol divisions has to handle that crash and is tied up for that period of time.”

The city had originally frozen the officer positions due to the city’s finances, Assistant City Manager Michelle Neuner said.

“We were going into some tough economic times,” Neuner said. “A lot of cities had that same sort of economic issue. We weren’t alone in that.”

The city’s annual total crime index has fluctuated year-to-year since 2008. Despite that year seeing four police positions frozen, the next year saw overall crime drop by 14.2 percent, with a total of 1,160 crimes, according to records from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Crime continued to drop another 18.4 percent over the next two years until it shot up by 32 percent in 2012, reaching 1,250 crimes. Last year saw a slight reduction with 1,185 crimes.

But while crime has gone up and down, the overall number of officers in Winter Park has seen a steady decline. The police department had 91 officers on hand back in 2008 compared to the 77 currently there today, Railey said.

Winter Park Police has also seen its response times increase over the past couple years. The average response time went from 1.98 minutes in 2013 to 2.35 minutes in 2014. The first quarter of 2015 saw a 2.91-minute response time, though six of the department’s officers were in training during that span of time.

City Manager Randy Knight noted that in the meantime the Winter Park Police Department still has three other positions that are vacant and need to be filled: officers in the patrol division, the high intensity drug trafficking task force and the detective division.

All three positions are already accounted for in the current budget, Knight said, whereas the four frozen positions would cost the city $85,000 per officer.

“I’m not against putting more people on the street,” Knight said. “I’d like to add 20 more officers, but you can only drive the response time down so much. [It’s about] being in the right place.”

The police department is currently processing officers for two of the three vacant positions, and budget talks for 2016 will continue throughout the city through September.