A new study of how the Anchorage Police Department is working shows that the city can expand its "community policing" efforts even without adding any sworn officers, Mayor Dan Sullivan said Thursday.

But Police Chief Mark Mew said such expansion will be limited unless the department hires more officers.

Community policing is a practice in which officers are regularly assigned to the same neighborhoods and participate in community events and meetings in an effort to get to know people. The mayor said he's behind this approach.

Mew said the department will be able to increase community policing just "in small ways" with existing staff.

"If we're going to do a lot more community policing, we're going to have to get our numbers (of officers) up a bit," he said.

The city hired The Police Executive Research Forum, a consultant based in Washington, D.C., to study how best to organize the police department's existing staff, and where to expand when the city has more money.

Police union president Derek Hsieh said the report sends him a somewhat different message than Sullivan got: "It appears to me that 90 percent of it addresses increasing staff," Hsieh said.

"If we're truly going to go to community policing, we need increased staff," he said.

Mew said he is interested in a proposal deep in the 156-page report to add 26 patrol officers, with the goal of reducing the amount of time officers spend responding to calls to about 40 percent of their day, and leaving the officers more discretionary time for community policing activities.

He said that scenario was not fully developed in the report, so the city is asking the consultants for a supplemental study, which should take about two weeks.

Sullivan said he commissioned the study as part of his attempt to make public safety a priority. He'll consider it as his administration is drafting next year's budget.

The study released Thursday also suggests what positions to eliminate first if the city decides to make cuts; and it recommends reorganizing the detectives' schedules and assignments.

69 MORE EMPLOYEES

The APD has one community policing team. The report discussed eventually adding another, and hiring five more officers and a sergeant to do so.

Even without adding any officers, the report says the police department can improve its community policing by:

• Keeping patrol officers on assigned beats to better build relationships, limiting the shifting of officers to new beats and out-of-beat calls.

• Having patrol supervisors serve as beat managers.

• Strengthening the existing division of the city into north and south sectors.

• Creating weekly community policing meetings, where crime data would be analyzed.

• Restructuring so that the individual units like school officers and traffic details support specific community problem-solving efforts, rather than operating with independent agendas.

In the future the department can be more effective by eventually hiring 49 more sworn staff members, including lieutenants, detectives, sergeants and officers, and 20 more civilians than were on staff as of July, the consultants said.

"In my view that's our long-range goal," said Mew.

That would result in 599 positions, 423 of them for sworn officers, the report said.

At minimum, the report said, even in a tight budget the city should hire someone to manage the dispatch center, and hire three sergeants to help manage patrol shifts.

BUDGET IMPLICATIONS

Sullivan, who is preparing the 2011 budget to submit to the Anchorage Assembly at the beginning of October, said it's not clear yet whether the city will be able to add the minimum recommended positions.

Since taking office in July 2009, Sullivan has been focused on holding down spending. The police department has gone from 561 employees in August 2009 to an expected 516 employees by the end of this year, the report said.

Last week, Sullivan released projections that shows he still thinks money is tight. City revenue next year will fall $18 million short of maintaining the same size government the city has this year, even if he and the Assembly increase property taxes to cover inflation. That gap is due in part to pay increases and higher debt payments.

Hsieh, president of the police union, the Anchorage Police Department Employees Association, said, "I was kind of hoping to hear the mayor make a strong commitment that he would not be reducing (police) employees based on the report."

But the mayor did not say that.

"Right now the question is way up in the air," said Chief Mew.

The report includes recommendations for what to cut in case the city decides to trim police department positions in the next year. If 20 sworn officers are cut, 12 should be detective positions and eight traffic positions, it said. If 30 officers are cut, 10 patrol officer positions should also go, and if 40 officers are cut, another 10 patrol officer positions should be eliminated, the consultants say.

FOUR-DAY WORK WEEK

In another finding, the consultants said the practice of working four 10-hour days per week works well for patrol and some other individual units, but does not appear to be the best way to deploy detectives.

All detectives except those assigned to vice are scheduled to work day shifts and only on weekdays. Though they are subject to being called out on overtime, none except for vice detectives are assigned to weekends or evenings.

"This schedule prevents some cases from receiving continuous investigative attention and delays the initial findings of some cases," the consultants said.

Mew said there are pros and cons to having detectives on nights and weekends.

"Say we had the special victims unit. If they're working days and you need to call out a detective at night, you would probably call one of them. If a general detective is on (a night shift), they might not have the training."

Night detectives would also have to work overtime to talk to daytime district attorneys and appear in court, he said.

In support of night detectives, some cases would get worked faster, he said.

$85,000 REPORT

The report's recommendations for staffing changes were based on identified best practices and workloads, the consultants said.

A previous study in 2003 also recommended increased staff, but it was based on a comparison of how many officers were recommended per 1,000 residents.

The authors of the current study said it doesn't work well to decide how many officers a force should have based on population because such ratios are not related to crime levels or effective local law enforcement.

Hsieh points out both reports, though they used different methods, called for more officers. "There's clearly a need to increase staff at the Anchorage Police Department."

The report cost $85,000.