'Not a bad number,' top cop says of poll

You might think that the public's opinion of the Philadelphia Police Department would be hovering near rock bottom, given the number of crooked cops who have been arrested in the last year.

You'd be wrong.

Seventy percent of 1,604 city residents who responded to a recent Pew Charitable Trusts public-opinion poll said that they have a considerable amount of respect for police.

An even higher number of those surveyed who said that they had had an encounter with a cop during the past two years described the officer as professional and courteous, according to the results of the poll, released yesterday.

"That's not a bad number, 70 percent, especially with some of the issues we've gone through," said Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

"It shows that people understand the department as a whole is good. But obviously, we need to work to get it higher."

Ramsey said that he was heartened to learn that 75 percent of those polled said that officers whom they had encountered during the last two years had acted respectfully.

But the poll, conducted by Pew's Philadelphia Research Initiative between Jan. 31 and Feb. 13, also found some not-so-good opinions of the department over a perpetually controversial topic: "stop and frisk."

While 61 percent said that they were in favor of cops' stopping and frisking suspicious individuals, 43 percent said that they didn't think that officers used good judgment when they pick out and pat down folks on the street.

People's perception of how well cops employed "stop and frisk" played out along racial lines.

The poll found that 57 percent of whites said that cops use good judgment in deciding whom to randomly pat down; that number fell to 30 percent among blacks and 48 percent among Hispanics.

Support for cops' "stop and frisk" approach was highest in Northeast Philly (58 percent) and South Philly (48 percent), and lowest in West Philly (31 percent) and North Philly (34 percent).

"It's not a surprise," Ramsey said. "It's something we definitely have to work on. We have to do a better job of explaining what we do and why."

The department has extensively trained officers on how to properly "stop and frisk" people, Ramsey said, and supervisors are now able to audit an officer's paperwork to determine how well he is performing on the street.

In a statement, Mayor Nutter called "stop and frisk" an important crime-fighting tool, but noted, "I will never accept inappropriate treatment of our citizens by police officers."