Proposed police department budget tops $40 million

Chief Ricky Boren presented a proposed $40.15 million police department budget for Columbus Council’s consideration on Tuesday.

The budget, which is part of Mayor Teresa Tomlinson’s proposed fiscal 2017 city budget, represents a $1.7 million, or 4.4 percent, increase over the fiscal 2016 budget.

The budget includes about $1.5 million in capital expenses, including more than $1 million for new pursuit and unmarked vehicles and their accompanying technology. It also includes $45,000 for 50 units of body armor.

Boren presented a brief overview of his department’s performance over the last year, compared to the year before, to indicate trends.

Officers were dispatched on more than 171,000 calls last year, and if you include incidents that police came upon while patrolling, the number rises to more than 200,000, Boren said. That was up slightly from the year before.

Among those were almost 12,700 auto accidents and almost 4,000 private property incidents, Boren said. Police wrote more than 58,000 incident reports.

Police response times improved in all three levels of priority, Boren said. For Priority 3 calls, the most urgent, the response time was 2:45, down from a little over 3 minutes. For Priority 2 calls, the response time was just over 5 minutes, down almost exactly one minute from last year. For the lowest priority calls, the time was a shade under seven minutes, down from a little over eight minutes.

Police sent fewer cases to Columbus Recorder’s Court last year, 64,626 compared to 66,476 the year before, but wrote 47,233 tickets, compared to just 43,225 the year before.

Arrests were down to 8,984 last year from 10,467 two years ago.

“We have to attribute that to shortages of manpower and also that Part One crimes are down for the year,” Boren said.

Among the Part One crimes, murder, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft and larceny were down while robbery and rape were up, the latter dramatically, from 47 the year before to 68 last year, Boren said.

“Part One crimes were down some 2,018 crimes from the year before,” Boren said. “This is a 14 percent reduction over 2014 and it’s a nine percent reduction over a five-year period.”

This story was originally published May 17, 2016 at 3:38 PM with the headline "Proposed police department budget tops $40 million."