“I live in Decatur and have previously seen the Decatur recruiting video and think it represents the police department here pretty accurately. We are a small city, just over 4 square miles with a residential population of about 20,000, and I recognized some of the officers in the video because you see them around town. I think there are maybe 45 or so officers. I was curious to know how we compared to Newport Beach in size, population, crime/clearance rates, type of community and such.

The Newport Beach video made me think the community must be some type of war zone but based on the Newport Beach website, that does not seem to be the case at all. Newport Beach is 26 square miles, with a residential population of over 85,000 “but during the summer months, the population grows to more than 100,000 with 20,000 to 100,000 tourists daily”. Decatur borders Southeast Atlanta and unincorporated Dekalb County and is the county seat housing Dekalb government offices, the courthouse, probation and parole offices, three public transit stations, etc. Newport Beach appears to be a coastal town made up of villages, islands and harbors located South of Los Angeles County and North of San Diego County. Both departments have community programs, stuff for kids and volunteer programs but Newport Beach is referred to as a “resort destination” on the homepage for their police department (referencing the 4th of July holiday). That video does NOT make me think of a “resort destination”.

Here are the links for the 2011 and 2010 Decatur Police Annual Reports which I found online. The reports show the crime rates and also the clearance rates and they also show data on things like citizen complaints and use of force.

http://www.decaturga.com/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=3280
http://www.decaturga.com/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=2349

Here are the links for the 2011 and 2010 crime rates I found on the Newport Beach site.

http://www.nbpd.org/crime/statistics/crime_by_year.asp
http://www.nbpd.org/crime/statistics/crime_by_year.asp?Year=2010

More crime overall because of population but what both cities have in common are pretty low violent crime rates. Newport Beach’s last homicide was in 2007. Decatur has had five homicides between 2007-2012, while their parent county, Dekalb, had 16 homicides in 2011 and 20 so far in 2012. I could not find clearance rates for Newport Beach online but if you look at just violent crime clearance rates in 2010 (2011 is not completed on the FBI site yet), Decatur cleared about 68% while the national rate of clearance is about 47%.

I could not find anything online about citizen complaints and use of force statistics for Newport Beach. When I Googled “Newport News Police Department citizen complaints” I received several hits about citizens complaining about homeless people and animal control issues. On a more interesting note, when I Googled “Newport Beach Police Department citizen complaint procedures”, the first article that popped up was one published in the LA Times in 1986 that opened with “A 700-page management audit of the Newport Beach Police Department released Wednesday generally gave the agency high marks but found that the department’s aggressive policing should be re-examined in light of excessive lawsuits and complaints.” The article also contains the following quote from the audit report, “To the extent that excessive force allegations are resulting from unnecessarily aggressive policing, aggressiveness should be reduced,” and “The continuous complaints and claims of excessive force are–whether unfounded or not–contributing to an undesirable image for the department.”

Here is the link to that article. It is old but an interesting read especially when you think about the “image” portayed in the current recruitment video 26 years later.

http://articles.latimes.com/1986-03-20/local/me-21592_1_patrol-officers

When I Googled “Newport Beach Police Department use of force”, the first hit led me back to the recruitment video and there were also links to articles about lawsuits in the 80′s and more links to the recruiting information.

i Googled the same phrases for Decatur Police Department and got instructions on how to file a citizen complaint in Decatur, IL and the annual reviews mentioned above from Decatur, GA.

Bottom line, you are going to get what you attract. As a community, would you rather have officers who can easily blend in with the community they serve and be approachable, social and professional but who can turn on a dime and take it up a notch when it is truly necessary…OR…Would you rather have officers who “ride on ready” in a more aggressive manner than what the day to day calls for and who have a hard time taking it down a notch because that is the culture they were recruited and trained into.

That video does not represent Newport Beach in a positive light. It does not invoke images of serving a coastal, village, resort type community.”