Following is testimony submitted by IHHAAC for the public hearing on the Public Safety Master Plan
Hon. Elizabeth Hewlitt, Chairman
Prince George’s County Planning Board
14741 Governor Oden Bowie Drive
Upper Marlboro, MD 20772
October 8, 2004
Re: Public Safety Master Plan
Dear Chairman Hewlitt:
On behalf of the Indian Head Highway Area Action Council, please accept the following comments into the record of the Public Hearing on the Public Safety Master Plan.
First, we should like to comment regarding two specific fire facilities; the existing fire station at 1110 Marcy Avenue in Oxon Hill which is planned for relocation in 2009, and the new station which is planned as part of the National Harbor development. We would ask that both of these projects be completed and on line before use and occupancy permits are granted for any of the permanent facilities at National Harbor. Our existing capabilities in that particular area are spread very thin, and there’s some question as to whether they will be able to adequately serve the community once National Harbor begins to open.
Our price concern having to do with public safety, however, continues to be the level of police protection.
I have personally been involved in various community and countywide civic organizations since the late 1980’s. Police service levels have been a matter of high concern among every one of those groups for that entire time, and the situation has clearly worsened in recent years. The rapid pace of development, particularly in the southern portions of the county and the Indian Head Highway corridor, has put even more pressure on an infrastructure that was known to be inadequate fifteen years ago.
In our area, a new District VII police station has been planned for well over a decade. We were quite disturbed, then, to find on page 8 of your brochure a statement to the effect that the “Public Safety Master Plan will reevaluate the need for these facilities…”
In our judgment, that’s a completely ridiculous proposition and unworthy of any serious consideration. Anyone who believes that the need for that station is at all in question has no business receiving a salary as a planner. This station is a critical element of keeping the area livable, and is necessary NOW.
District VII, unfortunately, is only one element in a much larger problem. The real need is staffing. Our police department is well below its authorized level, but even full staffing to that extent would be inadequate. Public safety experts have told us that truly adequate staffing would include on the order of 2,400 to 2,500 officers when population counts and FBI guidelines are taken into consideration. It should be further noted that those numbers represent needed actual officers on the street, exclusive of support staff, officers on extended leave of one sort or another, and so forth. Taken in that light, the situation is nothing short of frightening.
As an illustration, consider the following. I am the manager of Hyde Field, a general aviation airport in Clinton. Strictly from memory, I can come up with twelve recent occasions in which police were summoned due to incidents on the airport. They did not even show up for eight. One of those involved a violent assault in progress and another breaking and entering that ended with an assault with a motor vehicle (a dump truck). A third involved shots fired of unknown origin; we never did get that one sorted out.
For the occasions in which police did show up, the response times ranged from about 45 minutes to over six hours. And please bear in mind; these were calls for service from an airport, where one would expect an extra effort to respond in a timely manner. But, the reality is that when an officer comes on duty facing 15 or 20 waiting calls, things are going to get dropped.
One huge contributor to this problem is the manner in which we determine the adequacy of police and fire facilities when approving new development. The current criteria is a sham at best and it would not be unreasonable to characterize it as fraud. This process has been used to mislead our citizens and skew the development process since it was first put in place, and this has got to change. Staffing levels have gotten to the point that response times are ridiculous; as far as the police are concerned the equation would be more meaningful if simply based on whether they ever show up at all.
Meaningful public safety planning cannot take place in the absence of a realistic APF process. That’s something we just don’t have right now, and until that situation is fixed nothing else we do is going to matter. Determining police adequacy based on how much space each officer has in the station house is a completely valueless process; basing a finding of adequacy of fire and rescue facilities for homes that have sprinklers isn’t much better. That sprinkler system isn’t going to help a heart patient 20 minutes away from a paramedic any more than all that open space in a police station is going to help a crime victim.
We have a critical situation on our hands; in my mind no less so than the circumstances that led to the water and sewer moratorium decades ago. We simply cannot continue to approve development based on meaningless criteria that skew the process and put our entire population at such risk. CB-89-2004 which was recently introduced before the County Council will take a needed first step in the right direction, but much more is needed.
This process that we are embarking on has the potential to lay the groundwork for meaningful solutions. We implore you to take every step necessary to achieve that goal, and ask that you ignore the ill-intentioned pleas that are sure to follow from the development industry. This is nothing short of a crisis, and the principles of responsible governance demands that it be treated that way.
Thanking you for your consideration, I remain
Very sincerely yours,
Stan Fetter
Vice President
Indian Head Highway Area Action Council, Inc.