ST. LOUIS, Mo. -- Chief Sam Dotson will ask the Board of Police Commissioners today for permission to dismantle and reorganize some specialized units and accept donations to beef up hot-spot policing efforts.
Dotson will be asking to reassign about 28 officers attached to the Rapid Deployment Unit to work overlay shifts in the Third, Fourth and Sixth districts.
He also proposes to relocate six gang unit detectives from area stations to police headquarters downtown under a single command. And he's asking to put some specialized units -- such as SWAT, Narcotics, Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force and several others -- under the same commander as patrol officers so they can work more closely together.
Dotson said he has ordered Lt. Col. Al Adkins and Lt. Col. Larry O'Toole to track the impact of the reassignments during a six-month period before deciding whether to make the changes permanent.
"The idea is to transition to hot-spot policing as the way we do business, and we needed more flexibility in (patrol) to do so," Dotson said. "And this will allow us to do things like College Hill easier."
College Hill is a neighborhood in north St. Louis that has been hard-hit by violence this year. There have been three homicides and a shooting there, and Dotson deployed about 80 additional officers in the area about two weeks ago, pledging they will remain until the trouble stops.
Formation of the Rapid Deployment Unit, and assignment of two gang detectives to each area station, began under Dotson's predecessor, former Chief Dan Isom.
According to a study Isom commissioned from University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist David Klinger, specialized units such as the RDU, were responsible for 40 percent of officer-involved shootings from 2008-11, up from 5 percent in a 2008 report.
Dotson said that report's findings did not influence his decision to reorganize. He said he does not expect dismantling the RDU to have a negative impact.
"There's always a concern as you go into change, but the resources are still being tasked in a similar way," Dotson said.
The St. Louis Police Officers' Association president, Sgt. David Bonenberger, called the moves "a step in the right direction."
He admits he is biased by his work as a patrol sergeant.
"I certainly hope the realignment benefits the officers on the streets by helping spread the workload among more officers," he explained.
Bonenberger said he also supports centralizing the gang detectives. "These are units driven by intelligence gathering, so it just makes sense so the information can be shared more efficiently," he said.
The Board of Police Commissioners is scheduled to vote today on whether to accept a $500,000 donation from Lumiere Place casino, which would provide the department an additional $100,000 in each of five years for hot-spot policing in the Fourth and Fifth districts.
Copyright 2013 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
