Changing an archaic City Charter is a good place to start. How to help the city's police

By Eric J. Weinberg

Clearly, Philadelphia's criminal marketplace is flourishing, and despite the hard work of our dedicated police officers, violent crimes - and increasingly sophisticated non-street crimes such as identity theft - are rising. Sadly, our city has not given our police the tools and institutions they need to do the job.

The Philadelphia Police Department today operates under one of the most stringent and archaic civil-service systems in the United States. The constraints of the City Charter severely limit how a mayor and his police commissioner can appoint senior command staff, and, over time, budget realities and political priorities have limited the number of dollars that have been invested in the infrastructure of policing in the city.

Police officers in Philadelphia do more with less than most of their cohorts in other major cities. They have less professional development, they get less time on the firing range and less tactical training, they have no incentives that support college or master's degree programs for officers who look promising for future command, and they have little of the basic technology needed to fight increasingly modern crimes.

Sound like an overstatement? Take, for example, the city's detective squads, which typically are made up of 40 or more detectives who investigate major crimes ranging from identity theft and online child predators to homicide, rape and fraud. In a city that provides Wi-Fi in public parks, and where the Internet is ubiquitous, a squad of 40 detectives in Philadelphia shares a single e-mail account and has limited, or no, access to the World Wide Web.

The plethora of Homeland Security dollars that has flowed from the federal government in recent years, mostly in the form of grants to state and local governments, has largely not been accessed by the administration. In some documented cases, grant requests were never submitted by the Mayor's Office; in other instances, the city still has not spent grant money awarded in 2005.

The reality is that the incoming mayor and his police commissioner will have marginal authority to alter the way the Police Department is administered absent a charter change. The other reality is that absent a sea change in the way we support the profession of policing in this city, we will lose the best chance we have of attracting and keeping the best officers.

As crime goes up, our environment will become increasingly unwelcome to business. We need only to look at Oakland, Calif., where the cycle of crime and the exodus of business became so severe that the city now offers $79,000 a year as a starting salary for police recruits in the hope that a professional police force will create the secure environment necessary to encourage commerce to return. That is something we want to avoid.

Philadelphia's business community needs to help the new mayor and his police commissioner by offering support that does not now exist and that works around the constraints of the City Charter. For starters, the business community and our colleges and universities could offer limited annual scholarships for graduate degrees in business administration, criminology and government that the police commissioner could hand out to qualified members of his command staff as a reward for a job well done. Similar competitive programs could be put in place for rank-and-file officers as an incentive for performance. Perhaps our financial institutions could offer low-cost loans to officers looking to expand their professional development and move up.

Information-technology companies, consulting firms and the academic community could assist the Police Department in building the business processes and competencies necessary for effective intelligence-led policing programs. Perhaps the city could return the favor with a "Payment in Lieu of Taxes" - or PILOT - program that allows local businesses to pay less in city taxes for each dollar spent supporting identified public-safety programs.

If the business community can value, identify and apply the basic support options, and a new city and police administration is willing to look creatively at solutions beyond the present construct, perhaps we can begin to repay and protect the men and women in blue who protect us.