After re-aligning the Districts and downsizing from 10 Districts to 8 we have to ask ourselves is Metro Louisville any safer? I don't think so.
Officers are now driving further to get to runs and answer calls for assistance. The bottomline is It will take more time to get a Police Officer to you when you need one. This is not even taking into consideration that the Police Department is still over 130 officers short of their authorized strength.
One of the biggest problems is that two years into the Police Department Merger we still cannot talk to each other on the radio. That's right; the Louisville Metro Police Department still operates former City and former County dispatch centers on different frequencies. Officers from one division cannot talk with officers from a neighboring division and have no idea if crimes are being committed a block away.
Mayor Abramson is planning a new radio system that will be ready in 2006. Did merger sneak up on him? Did he forget that the safety of the public should have been his first concern, not expanding 4 th Street of Waterfront Park? Did he forget all of this when he was campaigning? Are drinking beer and playground equipment more important than the safety of our community?
The new Metro Safe radio system that won't be in place until 2006 should have been planned for and made a priority of his administration, not a backburner project. It will be all well and good that all emergency services will one day be able to talk to each other, but what do we do in the meantime? Do we just write off the murders and rising crime rate as one of "just one of those things?" Do we keep telling our citizens sorry we don't have any Officers to send you right now?On October 18th, Louisville was inundated with over 4 inches of rain. During the peak of the evening rainstorm the old and decrepit Urban radio system went completely down. The dispatchers did an admirable job, transmitting the runs of portable radios and writing calls down on scratch pads until the system was restored about a half an hour later. The thing is this should never have happened. Mayor Abramson has dropped the ball and put the safety of the citizens of Louisville and the Police Officers as a low priority. We should be on one radio system. There is no excuse for this.
Another problem that has become evident in the two weeks since District realignment is the fact that runs are being stacked in the system because there aren't enough Officers to dispatch them to and there are too many Districts on each channel. Currently Urban Channel 3 is not being used by anyone and Urban channel 4 is only being used in the evenings to check warrants. This is a huge oversight. We not only are short of Police Officers to make the calls, but we are short of dispatchers and call takers to put the calls out.
To the citizens of Louisville, I urge you to contact your Metro Council representatives about this problem. This issue needs to be resolved immediately, before we have any more citizens or officers hurt because of the poor planning of our Mayor and his staff.
To the Police Officers and Communications Staff I offer my condolences. Thanks for going above and beyond the call of duty.