Ramsey’s Crime Fighting Plan

Looking at his overall plan, there would seem to be some good:

Philadelphia’s new commissioner said he plans to disband the elite Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement team – the SITE unit, which was created in 2006 by former Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson to flood violent areas at night. Ramsey said that the SITE unit had drained resources from regular patrols to the detriment of the local districts.

My armchair quarterbacking here might be in error, but it would seem to me that anything that steps up regular patrols will help.  I don’t know much about SITE, or whether to accept Ramsey’s assessment of it, but if it was one of Johnson’s ideas, that makes me skeptical of it off the bat.

Ramsey instead plans to create a “mobile force” of officers who offer to work extra shifts during the high-crime summer weekends, when violent crime tends to spike.

A mobile force?  You mean one that drives around in patrol cars? :)  What does this mean?  Is all the overtime sustainable?  Are there enough officers who want the overtime?  Would it be cheaper to just hire more cops?

Ramsey said he would concentrate resources into nine of the city’s 23 police districts that were responsible for 65 percent of the city’s homicides: the 12th, 18th and 19th Districts in Southwest Division; the 14th, 35th and 39th Districts in the city’s Northwest Division; the 15th District in the lower Northeast; the 22d District in North Philadelphia and the 25th District in the Eastern Division.

That means little to me, so I can’t assess whether that’s the smart thing to do or not.   Wyatt Earp says it’s a whole lot of nothin’.  Since he’s in the department, and I’m not, I’ll defer to his judgment on this matter.

3 thoughts on “Ramsey’s Crime Fighting Plan”

  1. This appears to be just another distinction without a difference.

    He is merely marking his territory, just exactly the way dogs do.

  2. When Ramsey left D.C., The Washington Post gave his tenure a “B” for public relations, and a “D” for his actual impact. That should tell you something. He schmoozes the press and the public, but never makes good.

  3. Does this report imply that they weren’t concentrating the manpower in the districts and at the times when crime was highest?

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