New Police Substation to Use Scooters
St. Louis Police are using scooters in conjunction with a new Tower Grove East Substation, reports KSDK:
Alderman Reed hopes the substation and the scooters will be a crime deterrent in an area that’s known past problems, “It will send a signal to the bad guys that we’re open for business. We’re open to stopping all the bad activity.”
Of course, St. Louis used to have multiple police stations all over the city but back in the 1990s many of the districts were consolidated into three main stations: one south, one north and one on the West edge of downtown. Police HQ is also located downtown but I don’t know that any beat cops work out of that facility.
I think the scooters are a great idea. They are fast but still people friendly. A good middle ground between a bike cop and a motorcycle cop. And unlike the bike cops, these officers on scooters hopefully won’t be riding along on the sidewalks or going the wrong way on streets.
Back to the substation issue…
I’m no expert on criminology but it seems to me we sent the wrong message to criminals in the 1990s — cops are no longer part of the neighborhood so do what you like. We’ve been trying to overcome this for nearly 20 years through tiny substations in 7-11 storerooms and such.
What do you think of multiple districts being located in several large buildings rather than being dispersed throughout the city as they once were?
– Steve
One possible “advantage” of consolidation is elimination of so-called “middle management” and administrative personnel, leaving only the actual beat cops out-and-about in the substations. I don’t know if this is what’s actually happened or if that’s what really fueled the change, but at the very least it’s a side-effect.
As long as the actual enforcers are visible and accessible in the neighborhoods, and the management is responsive to the needs of the populace it serves and protects, then the organizational structure and the physical locations don’t matter so much to me.
When I was a kid, for a while I lived in Hanley Hill’s just outside of U-City. We had our own small police station – the Hanley Hill’s police station. I know the building is still there, I don’t know if the station is. It’s right in the middle of the neighborhood. But I do remember them really feeling like a part of the neighborhood, and not an outside entity. They really were a fixture. If you ever had a concern they’d be there within a minute and we knew all the officers by name. I still remember: Chief Angelo, officer Denny…. And that was over 20 years ago. They weren’t just law enforcement, they were friends you could count on to keep your neighborhood safe.
I think the idea of these smaller substations is really in line with a lot of the current criminal justice philosophy in St. Louis… that being that the police work WITH the residents. I’d love to see substations in individual neighborhoods, I think that it would help with both a sense of safety and a sense of community.
Many of the substations are never, ever, manned, and it’s not hard to tell by looking at them.
With integrated computer networks, there is no reason to have central offices for the police department. Physically decentralized police departments would still be centralized by the computer network, which is far superior to the ones of the 90’s. I would prefer to see police stations in neighborhoods, and community oriented policing, even if the folks at coptalk to not believe it works.