Chattanooga Police Department Chief Freeman Cooper applauded his officers Wednesday for their work keeping crime down over the last year, but warned that without new hires crime could increase.
"It's been said already that it appears that we can do more with less," Chief Cooper said. "It gets to a point where they (police) break."
Part 1 crimes -- which include homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and auto theft -- decreased by 1.3 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to Chief Cooper's annual report to the city. There were 19 reported homicides last year compared to 20 in 2008, the report states.
In Part 1 crimes -- which are reported to the FBI and used for local, state and national crime trend studies -- only robbery and burglary saw an increase in Chattanooga, with each rising 4 percent.
Based on Tennessee Bureau of Investigation numbers, Part 1 crimes in Chattanooga are down by 28 percent over the last eight years.
But when it comes to Chief Cooper's assessment that more officers are needed, he has some allies, including Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield, who says the city needs a new class for its police academy.
"In the next budget, we need to provide for an academy to begin to rebuild our forces," Mr. Littlefield said.
PDF: CPD report
An academy class graduated last year, but no class was budgeted this year.
Chief Cooper pointed to 20 police positions that are frozen, which prevents hiring to fill them, and vacancies in 25 other positions.
"We are manpower starving right now," he said. "That means the men and women who are there work twice as hard."
Reported incidents are up 4 percent, according to the report, while adult arrests are up 23 percent, the report shows. Those figures dispute the common perception that "crime is out of control," Mr. Littlefield said.
"The fact that arrests have increased and crime has gone down, I don't think those two figures are unrelated," he said.
The largest decrease was in violent crimes, particularly rape and aggravated assault, according to the report. Rapes were down 30 percent and aggravated assaults dropped by 8 percent.
Chief Cooper said that, while violent crimes are the hardest to predict or prevent because they usually involve people familiar with one another, work by police to respond aggressively to aggravated assaults may have had an effect on the number of homicides.
But the chief pointed to a rise in gang activity and said partnerships with community and neighborhood groups would help stem that tide.
Chattanooga police divide the city into three sectors and seven zones for patrol purposes. Within the annual report, zone and sector commanders from across the city pointed to both community relations and police saturation in reported "hotspots" as ways they combated crime.
East Lake Neighborhood Association President Lora Salter credited monthly meetings with the Citizen Police Interaction Committee as a way to communicate neighborhood concerns to officers working the area.
She was concerned, however, with the volume of work assigned to the five officers who work per shift in her area -- Fox Zone, one of the busier zones in the city. Without more officers to ease the workload, she said, she didn't see ways for them to interact with the community beyond responding to calls.
"For that to happen, the officers are not going to have to run from the moment they come on duty to the moment they go off duty," she said.
A former police dispatcher in Georgia, Ms. Salter worried that such shortages would burn out otherwise promising young officers.
"They never get to interact with the common citizen," she said. "Sometimes they get jaded."