BELLEVILLE -- When Police Chief William Clay was appointed in 2007, he said he wanted to bring the police department into the 21st century.
The police department now receives 16,000 more calls for service per year than it did in 1995, and it has only three more officers -- 82 now -- to handle that load.
Since joining the department in 1995, Clay said he has watched the growth of a more transient population and the proliferation of rental housing contribute to an increase in crime. Mayor Mark Eckert attributes the crime growth partly to the annexation of at least 3,000 acres in that period of time.
Clay has a wish-list, a number of items he'd love to have to get the department to where he'd like it to be:
* Ten more police officers. With training, salary and family benefits, a new officer costs about $70,000 for the first year. Clay has applied for federal grant money to hire eight more officers, but he isn't holding out hope. He said the dollars usually go to bigger cities.
* A squad car for every officer to take home. Each equipped squad car costs about $35,000. Clay said each officer having a car would be helpful in major incidents that demand as many officers as possible. He cited as example the shooting of Sgt. Jon Brough by a double-homicide suspect in 2006. Clay said the department would have liked to have more officers on the scene during the standoff that led up to the shooting, but there weren't enough squad cars.
* Coplogic, a Web-based program that allows the public to make reports online. It costs $20,000 initially, then $4,000 per year for updates and tracking. The reports go straight to detectives, who can accept them or decide to take a report in person. Clay said the savings in officers' time responding to every call would top $25,000.
* A mobile records management system. It would cost $250,000. It gives officers access to multiple databases at their laptops in the field. Clay said officers spend a lot of time calling dispatchers to get information from the databases. It also would allow them to complete reports digitally and send them to detectives from the field.
Included in Belleville's challenges, Clay said, are that it's the county seat, has several high schools, the county jail and courthouse, 400 miles of roadway, has at least 40 percent rental housing, and is bordered by "economically challenged" communities. Also, he said, the people committing crimes don't all live in the city; many of them are parolees recently released from the St. Clair County Jail or just visiting the community.
Clay said thinks the police department has come a long way since he came on in 1995. Then, the city had a reputation for being "unfriendly" to minorities, he said. The city had just settled a hiring discrimination lawsuit. He said the police department also was "hostile" when it came to working with other police agencies.
Now, minorities make up more than 21 percent of the population, up 6 percent from 2000, and Clay, also the city's first African-American police officer, became the first black police chief in 2007.
Clay recently appointed Sgt. John Moody as chief of investigations. He's the first African-American to hold that job in Belleville, and he replaced Major Roger Barfield, who retired from the police department and now works as manager of the health and housing Department.
Also, Clay said, under former chief Terry Delaney, the department started tracking parolees released by the county. The following chief, Dave Reubhausen, embraced new technology and began collaborating with other police agencies to more effectively handle crime.
"Getting away from this island unto ourselves mentality," Clay said.
Clay has built on those changes. He's added video cameras to all police cars and introduced interoperable radios that allow Belleville police to communicate with other emergency agencies. And he's preparing to assign an officer to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's metro-east task force.
His most recent initiatives include beat-policing, in which each region of town will have its own four officers, and the creation of a "street-sweeper" unit, which works to identify gang activity and other specific problems.
Right now, with his wish-list, Clay is just trying to lay the groundwork; when the new budget is being worked up in the spring, he'll pitch at least the Web-based reporting tool.
But he admits he doesn't expect the world.
"I am painfully aware of the city's budget difficulties in this environment," Clay said. "The mayor has a city to run, and it's not just the police department."
Clay's department takes up the biggest chunk of the city's General Fund, which mostly comes from sales tax revenue, which is down 8 percent from last year. City Treasurer Jerry Turner said that's mostly due to the drop in automobile sales.
Eckert frequently equates being mayor with being a parent.
"Yeah, I'd love to hire more police, but we've got to be able to pay'em," said Eckert, who added that the police department needs a new home. He said it's 52-year-old building is no longer suitable. "There's always new toys and things out there that would be good, but you've got to prioritize."
He said that while no cuts have been planned for the police department, he can't promise anything. Compounding the already noticeable effects of the recession is the potential loss of Wagner Buick-Pontiac-GMC, and the sales tax that comes from it. The dealer's contract with General Motors Co. expires in October 2010; owner Rusty Wagner appealed to keep his sales agreement, but General Motors denied the appeal.
Eckert said layoffs would be a "last-case scenario," and added, "public safety is not the first place we're going to even try to look for cutting positions."
Ward 3 Alderman A. "Gabby" Rujawitz retired eight years ago as a sergeant with the police department. He said he can't believe how far the department's come since he started. He didn't think he'd see computers and cameras in cars. He's also a member of the aldermanic Police and Fire Committee, and he said he supports Clay's plans for the department.
"I'm generally for anything they need," Rujawitz said. "If we can get it out of our budget, I'm for it. Don't tie their hands if there's something out there that can work."
The economic downturn means police agencies around the country are running into fiscal constraints, said David Klinger, an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri -- St. Louis.
"We do know that at some point, if you don't have enough law enforcement resources, people will engage in activities that otherwise they would not," Klinger said. "If you don't have the bodies out there to engage in effective policing, crime can get a foothold in the community, then bad stuff can happen."
Eckert said that, although money is tight, it's hard to assign a dollar value, "when you talk about saving lives."
If people don't feel safe, he said, "You'll never grow your community, we know that."
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