Recycling CAN

Chuck Byrd’s phone rang late February 6.

It was the police. Could he come down to his auto body repair shop near 27th and Troost? A man had thrown a cinder block through Byrd’s plateglass window, the biggest, most expensive window in the whole building. Officers alerted by the burglar alarm had found the man standing in Byrd’s office, drunk.

It was the kind of call Byrd used to get two or three times a month. For years, troublemakers from the inner city neighborhood looked at Byrd Collision Repair as a convenient supplier of tools.

Then the CAN cops came along. The Community Action Network, created in the early 1990s, was one of the Kansas City Police Department’s early forays into community policing. Though trendy, the practice is a throwback to the days when the neighborhood cop walked his beat, getting to know the shopkeepers and children as well as the muggers and hit men. Pairs of CAN officers were assigned to six troubled neighborhoods scattered between 63rd and Prospect on the south and Independence Avenue and Hardesty on the north.

And it has worked. The officers draw passionate support from the neighborhoods they serve. The residents rave about police officers’ shooting hoops with neighborhood kids, attending community meetings and arresting hoods who have long haunted the streets. Byrd has experienced the effect firsthand. “Now I’m able to sleep at night,” he says.

At least he was until late fall 2000, when the department determined that it needed more cops responding to 911 calls all over the city. A study, done at the suggestion of the city auditor, showed that on average, it took officers more than ten minutes to arrive on the scene of even the highest-priority calls, including rapes in progress, shootings and stabbings.

Police spokesman Captain Rick McLaughlin warns against exaggerating the statistics’ significance. Having never tracked response times before, the officers may not have been accustomed to calling in to report that they were on the scene. And heavy radio traffic may have caused reporting delays. But the public imagined a horrified wife shivering in her front yard for ten long minutes, her husband in a heap at her feet, blood oozing onto the grass.

Accurate or not, the response times were “unacceptable” to Chief Richard D. Easley, who reacted on December 10 by pulling specialty officers, such as CAN cops, from their assignments to answer patrol calls. Easley promised to return the officers within ninety days, but the officers’ withdrawal prompted Byrd to move his body shop’s fax machine and other valuables to an inner office with a separate lock at night, thinking: “This is a free-for-all for all the bad guys.”

McLaughlin says the reassignment was a stopgap measure to see whether more bodies on patrol would help with response times. The most recent statistics showed that December’s response times were slightly better than November’s despite the extra calls associated with the Christmas holiday.

Frankly, Byrd and his neighbors did not expect to see the CAN officers again. But Easley stayed true to his word. He returned the officers to their CAN assignments March 4.

How long they will remain this time is yet to be determined. Easley will address the police board at 9 a.m. March 28 on the sixth floor of police headquarters at 12th and Locust. At that time, Easley will offer his recommendation for addressing the response-time problem. Easley declined to speak with the Pitch, preferring to hold his ideas until that board meeting.

When Easley does speak, Dan Dow will be listening. Dow lives in the Ruskin Hills area near Longview Lake in south Kansas City. He has been active with law enforcement in his neighborhood since his own car was stolen from his driveway a few years ago.

Dow’s neighborhood had been enjoying the presence of another group of specialty officers called the Community Action Team. The city has 33, each assigned to one of the city’s five patrol divisions. Like the CAN officers, they had been exempted from routine calls to do the kind of proactive police work characteristic of community policing. But CAT cops came out of the ninety-day 911 experiment with continued responsibilities for patrol calls.

Dow believes their return to patrol duty was a mistake.

“They need to leave these teams alone, let them continue what they have been doing,” he says. “To fold them back in there … it would just undermine everything they have accomplished. You’ve opened the door to the wolves again.”

The issue confronting Easley is one of fairness. If two officers are going to meetings and playing basketball with kids at 27th and Troost, they aren’t available to respond to calls elsewhere in the city.

McLaughlin says he doesn’t know what Easley has in mind, but he says he will be surprised if the department steps back from community policing, of which the chief has been “extremely supportive.”

“The idea is eventually for everybody on the department to be involved in community-oriented problem solving,” McLaughlin says. “Until you have everybody involved, you really don’t have community policing.”

At the same time, the department can’t sacrifice its primary duties, McLaughlin says.

“When we have emergency calls, we have to have people to answer the calls and answer them in a reasonable amount of time,” he says.

Finally released from routine 911 calls, CAN officers near Byrd’s body shop soon made an impression on the neighborhood’s bad guys. The first Monday back, officers Doug King and Chip Taylor were watching 27th and Troost from a roof. They saw a man run to his car and recognized him as a “major player” in the supply of crack cocaine to the street dealers. They had other officers stop the car on a traffic violation. A search uncovered 63 rocks of crack.