B Y K E L LY K E N O Y E R
STRETCHED TOO THIN
Chief Kerns says he’ll bring police staffing proposals to the City Council in January
ublic calls for service from the police have increased
36 percent in the past three years in Eugene, but staff-
ing levels at the Eugene Police Department have not
risen to match the growing needs of the community,
EPD Police Chief Pete Kerns says.
The chief wants money for more police officers and op-
tions such as Community Court, while critics say money
would be better spent addressing the problems of homeless-
ness.
With an average of 64 additional calls for service each
day, Kerns says, wait times are increasing, and police have
limited time for regular patrol duties that keep the commu-
nity safer.
“There’s a finite capacity to do work,” Kerns says. “We
only have 50 officers that work in a 24-hour period, so if we
have more work coming in they have to proactively do less
work.”
Oregon has the lowest number of police officers per capita
compared to every other U.S. state, Kerns says, “and Eugene
is a little bit below the state average.”
Kerns says he is limited to a certain staffing level by
EPD’s $53 million budget. “If the community wants more
police service we need more police officers.” He says he will
bring a few proposals to the Eugene City Council in January,
but did not disclose their exact content. “The council could
choose to ask for a levy. We’re going to be providing them
with some options.”
The limited staffing translates into slower service for
Eugene, the chief says. The highest priority calls (including
emergencies), priority 1 and 2 calls, have seen an increase of
nearly a minute in wait time before police arrive since 2014.
Kerns says that can mean an entire extra minute of wait-
ing on the phone with 911 while someone is pounding on
your door trying to get in. “Sometimes people will wait a day
or two days for us to respond to a burglary,” he says.
As previously reported by Eugene Weekly (“Springfield
Police Levy,” 11/2), EPD’s response time for these high pri-
ority calls is significantly longer than the Springfield Police
Department's, with Eugene residents waiting 10 to 14 min-
utes and Springfield residents waiting less than five minutes
for the same kinds of calls. Springfield successfully re-upped
its jail levy in November, and the Lane County Jail’s levy
was passed twice by voters.
Eugene has seen an increase in crime over the past three
years, EPD data show. The majority of calls for service are
centered on downtown and the Whiteaker neighborhood,
with another hotspot of property crime in the West Univer-
sity neighborhood.
Kerns says this may be due to increased rates of home-
lessness in Eugene, along with poor drug enforcement and a
lack of mental health resources.
But programs like Community Outreach Response Team
(CORT) and Community Court have helped reduce recidi-
P
6
November 30, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
‘We only have 50 offi-
cers that work in a
24-hour period, so if
we have more work
coming in they have
to proactively do less
work.’
— EPD POLICE CHIEF PETE KERNS
vism rates with frequent flyers — the top 40 repeat offenders
who were not deterred by arrest.
Sgt. Julie Smith is in charge of the downtown team. She
says her team often does patrol-type activity, but during cer-
tain shifts, “We primarily respond to calls to service, and
there weren’t enough of us to get to all the calls that were on
the screen.”
“I started looking at the fact that there is a core number of
individuals that are repeat offending, recidivism, and causing
a big portion of the problems,” Smith says. “So just arresting
them 200 times a year was not changing their behaviors.”
Smith helped start CORT in 2016 — a program that
works with these top arrestees and helps them meet their
needs through community resources such as drug and alco-
hol counseling, health services, mental health services and
housing instead of jail time. In the trial run of CORT, “Nine-
ty-five percent of those individuals in that six-month period
did not reoffend,” Smith says.
Smith adds that her downtown team is now integrating
this humanist approach in all their contacts.
“We’re experiencing big-town problems,” Smith says. “I
am hoping that the community looks at the bigger picture
and looks at the holistic approach that we’re trying to take.”
Lauren Regan, executive director of Civil Liberties De-
fense Center, says taxpayer money is better spent somewhere
other than policing in order to address homelessness. “Rather
than spending more money on law enforcement, that same
amount of money should be spent putting it toward social
services, whether that be housing or mental health services,”
Regan says.
Regan points out how underfunded Lane County Mental
Services already is, and she says taxpayers should fund hu-
man services instead of policing. “Until we address the fail-
ure to provide basic mental health assistance, housing, etc.,
then all the cops in the world are not going to fix the home-
less problem in Eugene.”
One proposal Kerns plans to discuss with the City Coun-
cil in January may include an expansion of the CORT team
and Community Court.
“We have a social problem here in Eugene with home-
lessness and the mental health problems and the addiction,”
Kerns says. “It’s going to require an approach that acknowl-
edges that those folks are going to continue to offend no mat-
ter how many times we put them in jail and no matter how
long they stay in jail if we don’t also provide treatment for
them.”
City Councilor Emily Semple says, “I do think we need
more police. We are short-staffed, officers are over-worked
and areas of town aren’t getting the police response they
should. Downtown is still a critical situation.” She adds that
CORT and Community Court “are great and are making a
difference downtown. More funding for those programs
would be fantastic and the outcomes would be significant.”
The focus for EPD funding requests seems to be on so-
lutions to recidivism and homelessness. Possible proposals
include extending CORT to cover more hours — CORT cur-
rently only operates for 10 hours a week. Additionally, Kerns
says, “What we’ll probably ask the council to do is give us
more Community Court time.”
Kerns says an increase in staffing alone won’t be enough
to lower crime rates in Eugene — it will take a more sus-
tained effort to help treat those who frequently reoffend.
“We can both make the place safer and improve the lives
of people living in the street,” Kerns says, “and it would be
a pretty amazing accomplishment if we could do both those
things at once.”