Fraud settlement will upgrade DPS' Tucson crime lab
By Howard Fischer
Arizona Daily Star
December 27, 2006
City Council members made it clear Friday that they once again see fighting crime as Durham's top priority in coming year, with Mayor Bill Bell saying he'd like to see double-digit cuts percentage-wise in all categories of offenses.
But when asked to outline a strategy for implementing that desire, elected officials and administrators offered little in the way of new ideas. They said the city government has to continue most of the things it's already doing in the field, including efforts to work with youth, reach out to local Hispanics, join forces with federal law-enforcement agencies, and target gangs.
Officials complained that the Durham County Sheriff's Office hasn't done a good job of implementing at least one long-sought initiative, an effort to fingerprint misdemeanor suspects. And they said other programs could stand improvement.
Also, police likely should create an anti-prostitution unit, and officials should try harder to secure corporate backing for crime-prevention efforts, Deputy City Manager Ted Voorhees said as he summarized the thinking that emerged from a during a daylong planning retreat for council member and the city administration's department heads.
Bell and outgoing Police Chief Steve Chalmers -- who clashed last year at a similar retreat when the mayor pressed authorities to take steps to cut Durham's homicide rate -- stressed this time around that the city government can't carry the fight on its own.
"The majority of the root causes and conditions that impact me where I sit have to do with things that are more in the control of the county," Chalmers said. "Last year, 575 kids dropped out of school. You go back 10 years, where are these individuals? Probably dealing with social services, mental health and drug addiction and involved in crime. We have no control over those types of services and I end up getting the brunt of that. [Police] are limited."
Bell agreed. "I don't think this council holds you responsible for the total piece on crime," he told Chalmers, who will retire later this year. "We realize it's a community problem."
Friday's discussion was held against the backdrop of new statistics showing violent crime in Durham is running at a four-year high. While homicides dropped sharply last year, through the first nine months of 2006 rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults all occurred more frequently than they had since 2003.
Council members made it clear that they haven't forgotten -- or accepted -- the warning against citizens being out alone at night that Deputy Police Chief Ron Hodge delivered last month while briefing them on the latest crime statistics.
Like Hodge last month, Chalmers on Friday stressed that the warning was a generic call for common sense.
Crime "is everywhere, not just in the city of Durham," Chalmers said. "Regardless of where you live, you need to take certain precautions when you go out."
He added that the effects of crime fall unevenly on the city's population.
"We try to give a realistic understanding of what's going on in the community," Chalmers said. "Yes, some innocent people are going to get caught up in crime. But when you look at violent crime, it usually involves people who knew each other and are involved in a particular lifestyle."
The complaints about the Sheriff's Office's handling of the fingerprint program surfaced early and came from both Chalmers and Voorhees. "We are not where we need to be on that," Chalmers said. "It is not being done on a regular basis. I don't know if that has to do with staffing."
Voorhees later said a "money issue" was in the way, and voiced frustration about the situation. "How long have we been talking about this?" he queried. "We know if we fingerprint misdemeanants, we'll find felons."
The program -- which officials hope will expand the county's fingerprint database and make it easier to identify those responsible for serious crimes -- got off to a rough start last spring when Sheriff Worth Hill told the County Commissioners he wouldn't hire anyone to run it unless they also gave him money to hire more staff for the Durham County Jail.
Hill and the commissioners eventually compromised by underwriting the hiring of five jailers and five fingerprint technicians.
But a key subordinate of Hill's, Capt. Paul Martin, warned before the vote that the fingerprinting program was likely to prove to be a disappointment.
He said that five people weren't enough to operate it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that local law enforcement didn't have the computers necessary to compare fingerprints from a crime scene against the entire database.
"There is no evidence that fingerprinting misdemeanants has had any effect on crime or clearance rates," Martin said in a June 15 article published in The Herald-Sun. "This is another systematic solution that sounds good, but the fact is, any experienced investigator knows that fingerprint evidence is vastly overblown in the greater scheme of solving crimes."
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