Out of the shadows: In the communities

By Ethan Smith
Published in News on December 12, 2016 10:06 AM

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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO

Joey Luciano, a basic law enforcement training cadet, talks with children in the Elmwood Terrace neighborhood. Once he completes his training he will have the opportunity to get hired on the Goldsboro Police Department.

Despite investments from the Goldsboro City Council, the city's Police Department remains shorthanded.

The latest numbers show 22 positions vacant within the department, many of them patrol officer slots, which has been a consistent issue over the last several years.

Police Chief Mike West said the shortage in manpower is preventing the department from accomplishing everything it would like to on the community policing front, including reducing crime.

"As far as just my patrol division, I'm 15 short -- that's 23 percent of my patrol division that's not out there," West said. "Three investigators short, two in crime prevention, two in housing, one in SEU (Selective Enforcement Unit) -- so we're just short throughout the department, and it just prevents us as a department from working effectively with our community policing."

But more police officers could be on the streets of Goldsboro as early as January pending final background checks for seven candidates.

West expects the hirings to reduce the number of vacancies from about 20 down to 14 which will bring the force closer to full staffing levels.

An additional three officers could also be added later in the year, after the candidates complete basic law enforcement training in August. The officers would also need to complete four months of on-the-job training with a field training officer.

"I'm optimistic," West said. "I think next year is going to be a breakout year for us. I really feel like it's going to be a good year for us and a good year for the citizens of Goldsboro."

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An influx of new officers is expected to boost department morale, reduce the number of extra hours officers are working and help increase community policing efforts, West said.

Some in the community say they have already seen an increase in police presence, specifically in areas most prone to violence.

Jim Yaseen runs the Beestown Mart at the corner of South Slocumb Street and Olivia Lane.

He worked in Jacksonville around 2000, and said things were worse there as far as violent crimes. Then the police came and cleaned up the streets. Now he is seeing the same thing here.

"The minute we call them, it doesn't take them that long. Maybe four, five minutes and they're here."

That wasn't so months back when Yaseen first moved to Goldsboro.

"Nowadays I notice, it's been like three, four months ago, they'll be around a lot. That's why there is not a lot of shooting like before," Yaseen said. "They used to do shootings every night."

Today it's not as bad, he said. But it's still a risky neighborhood.

To do more with less officers, West said the department is restructuring some of its units to more effectively police the areas that need it.

West said the department has restructured its VICE unit and refocused its Intelligence Unit to hone in and specialize on what those units need to be doing instead of allowing officers to stay too long on the VICE unit.

"Our intelligence unit became sort of a catch-all instead of focusing on gathering intelligence. It kind of got watered down and got us in five directions, and my intention is to bring it back to being an intelligence unit," West said. "It'll be getting intelligence from other agencies and putting it out to officers, and we'll be putting our information out to other agencies."

The Goldsboro Police Department has the capacity for 110 officers. Currently, there are 89, a number that has fluctuated with recent retirements.

And city officials have continued to add equipment, new vehicles, training and take-home police cruisers in an effort to improve the department and lure officers to Goldsboro. Pay incentives were also recently added that provide higher pay scales for officers receiving specialized training and higher education.

If the new officers are hired, they will be on the streets in January and assigned to a field training officer for four months. The additional three candidates, which plan to start law enforcement training at the first of the year, would be part of the city's new pre-hiring program.

If hired, new officers would receive the city's benefit package and be paid at 10 percent below the starting officer salary of $35,593 while they attend basic law enforcement training.

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In addition to recruiting, the department is trying to have more community events and become more accessible to the public, doing things like hosting Movie With A Cop night in September and several community conversation events over the past few months. Officers have also taken the department's new robotic officers to stores like Target to interact with children. Robotic officers -- one of which is named Officer Seymour -- provide police a way to interact with children that might be less intimidating than an officer in uniform.

West added that officers are making a concerted effort to be part of community events when they are invited without making people scared that they will come to the event and begin looking for people to serve arrest warrants on.

"I think people are scared we're going to come down there and run warrants and arrest people. But that's not why we're there," West said. "When there's an event like that where we're trying to reach out to the community, show the community that we're human, maybe we can take a day off of serving warrants and maybe take a softer approach. I'm not saying not hold people accountable for their actions, but we've got to humanize ourselves a little bit more."

There are some who believe their neighborhoods don't need police -- not because they're against police presence, but because they don't think crime is high enough in their area to warrant it.

Ellen Edwards lives on East Spruce Street. She said she feels more than comfortable living in the projects near Spruce Street and Hollowell Avenue.

"You hardly see cops in this project at all," Edwards said. "The cops is great here. We don't have no problems in this project. It's a beautiful project."

D.R. Halliday, planning director of a local organization called the New Buffalo Soldiers, worked as a police officer himself for 12 years in Philadelphia, Pa., and also served four years in the United States Air Force.

As an officer, he worked in a juvenile division and in a gang control unit.

"We got out in the street and dealt with the kids that we worked with," Halliday said.

He said he would like to see more officers getting out of their cars and hitting the streets to build relationships with the community.

Around the city, he said he sees young men and women who are not preparing themselves for any sort of future, and that things must change.

"Police, I see their cars going by, their windows are up and they're black and you can't look in and say hello," Halliday said. "The sector that I had, I knew folks on my sector. I knew people. I don't think the police here know the folks that they're policing."

If West can accomplish the goals he has set forth and bring his department up to a full staff, he said he feels officers will be able to practice community policing more than they are currently able.

He is also well aware that, given all of this, the City Council and community expect something in return -- namely, a lower crime rate.

"They want crime to go down, they want the community to be safer, they want these neighborhoods cleaned up -- not just from the criminal element but from the blight -- and we can do that. We can help with that," West said. "There's a lot of stuff that we're that close to, but I've just got to get the bodies."

-- Staff writer Rochelle Moore contributed to this story.