MADison is safe
While our crime rate remains among the lowest in the nation and violent crime is down 14% from last year, public safety is a real concern in our community. Last summer I went to eight neighborhood meetings attended by about 2,500 residents. I listened closely to their stories and we took action.
The Downtown Safety Initiative put more cops on the street during key weekends like football Saturdays. The rash of incidents downtown decreased from 112 robberies in 2006 to 58 in 2007.
 The Southwest Neighborhood Plan focuses on improving the safety and quality of life on the southwest side. City Departments are hard at work on many of the plan’s recommendations, including: enhancing community policing efforts and exploring the development of a southwest side community center.
We also put in place a successful plan to gate and ticket the Halloween event, now known as Freakfest. In 2007, that resulted in $100,000 in reduced costs and $70,000 in increased revenues. Arrests were down from 235 in 2006 to 175 in 2007.
In September, we passed a chronic nuisance abatement ordinance that gives the City Attorney a new tool to get after bad landlords. That tool is being used to good effect.
In my 2008 budget, we added 30 new police officers, twelve of which started in an accelerated academy last month. This brings to 56 the total number of new police officers added in the last five years. That’s over 11 per year compared to an historic average of only 5 per year before 2003. To ensure that we are also working smarter to prevent crime, we will soon add two new crime analysts, tripling our staffing in that area.
The Neighborhood Indicators pilot project, inspired by a program in Charlotte, North Carolina, is designed to alert us to early warning signs of stress in a neighborhood, so we can target small investments in the short run to avoid spending much more in the long run.
We are also exploring the use of Community Service Officers. These would be City employees who could deal with a variety of issues to give our customers better service while not taking the time of our sworn officers.
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