Jenna Pizzi, and Jessica Masulli Reyes

The News Journal

When budget lawmakers who control the state's purse strings were deciding to give $1.5 million to Delaware's largest police forces to fight crime in Wilmington last month, they wanted to make sure the money would be well spent.

So the Joint Finance Committee added a proviso: In order for the pool of money to be released, Wilmington must first hand over police force deployment data, including the number of officers assigned to specific tasks and how many are on desk duty.

The request was not unusual. In the last year, separately, Mayor Dennis P. Williams and Police Chief Bobby L. Cummings publicly shared similar information with legislators and city budget officials.

But now, in a political standoff, Williams has refused to turn over the information, either publicly or privately to lawmakers, putting in jeopardy $1.5 million of state money that some say is desperately needed for the city police to fight crime and improve police-community relations.

The mayor has said he won't turn over the information because he has "taken offense" at the "unfair stipulations."

“I think that the mayor and the administration feel that this is political, but it isn’t," said Rep. James “JJ” Johnson, a New Castle Democrat. "We are just asking for information that anyone else would ask if they were giving them money.”

The funds, which stem from settlements with the nation's top lenders for their part in the 2008 financial crisis, would be divided between city, county and state police to pay for 20 weeks of foot patrols and overtime shifts in Wilmington. Another $75,000 is for a Delaware State Police analysis of Wilmington crime data and high-crime areas.

The stalemate is the latest example of festering tension between city and state officials. Lawmakers worry law enforcement resources are being misallocated in the state's largest city; city officials are annoyed by constant criticism from lawmakers and fear a state takeover of the police

“To me, it’s incomprehensible why they would withhold this information,” said Maria Haberfeld, the chairwoman of the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College in New York City. "$1.5 million is waiting for you, and you don’t want to get it to improve your department. It’s very puzzling."

Williams, who is seeking re-election this year, did not respond to an interview request for this story. A spokeswoman from his office explained why he does not want to comply with the request from lawmakers.

Initially, Williams said the information being requested by lawmakers was sensitive and shouldn’t be provided through email.

Then in a letter to lawmakers in December he added that putting restrictions on Wilmington, and not Dover, was unfair. The committee has already given $580,000 to crime-fighting efforts in Dover.

Even as City Council passed a resolution urging him to release the data to lawmakers and Attorney General Matt Denn met with him, Williams refused to budge in mid-December.

Most recently, the spokeswoman, Alexandra Coppadge, said the city believes the strings attached to the funding are strategically designed to allow for a state takeover of the Wilmington Police Department. Members of the Joint Finance Committee brought up the potential for a state takeover when they allocated the money.

“Given that the state of Delaware has rarely, if ever, removed a municipality’s authority over its own police force, we are vehemently opposed to accepting funding where the state threatens to seize control of Wilmington’s police department,” Coppadge said in a statement. “It would require the full General Assembly to vote in favor of amending the city’s charter in order to remove the [city's] unilateral policing authority.”

She added that Williams is open to releasing a breakdown of officers’ assignments but won't release “sensitive” information publicly, such as the names of officers and information about vacancies.

In the coming weeks, Williams, a former city police detective and former lawmaker who chaired the Joint Finance Committee, will try to convince lawmakers to back pedal on the conditions and threat of a takeover.

“As the mayor of Wilmington and a past representative of the state of Delaware, I recognize the multitude of issues involving the acceptance and use of this proposed funding and that is more than simply providing data," Williams said in a New Year's Eve statement posted on Facebook. “As an elected official who has assumed the responsibility of maintaining our home rule and ability to govern, I have taken offense to the senseless and unfair stipulations placed on Wilmington. The city of Wilmington is not for sale!”

State Sen. Karen Peterson, a Democrat from Stanton who sits on the committee and posed the question about a takeover, said she doesn't plan to remove the strings attached to the money.

"All I want is Wilmington to be a safer place, but we also have an obligation to spend money responsibly," she said.

The standoff comes as crime in Wilmington has reached near record levels. In 2015, 131 people were hit by gunfire in Wilmington, 26 of them fatally. The city has had one shooting so far this year.

The record for shootings was 154 in 2013, and a year later, Newsweek magazine wrote a story headlined "Murder town USA" that examined the intense gun violence in its neighborhoods.

The state has funneled millions of dollars into Wilmington to aid crime-fighting efforts in the last year. There was $200,000 for consultants to study the police department as part of the Wilmington Public Safety Strategies Commission, formed by the Legislature and Gov. Jack Markell. The consultants provided 114 recommendations on how the department could improve.

Williams and Cummings have repeatedly said officials are working to reduce incidents, and have implemented or plan to implement the majority of the commission recommendations.

Another $750,000 was allocated from the Legislature’s bond bill to help Wilmington Police set up a Real Time Crime Center, which they will use to monitor the streets and officers.

In March and April, Attorney General Matt Denn convinced the Legislature to put $422,5000 toward foot patrols, nearly identical to the ones he called for last month.

Breaking down the numbers

This isn't the first time city officials have resisted providing information over police deployment.

Councilwoman Loretta Walsh, who was first elected to City Council in 1985, said for as long as she can remember no Police Department or mayor has readily complied with requests regarding police data, specifically how many officers are assigned to desk duty.

In 2010, the councilwoman went back and forth with Mayor James Baker and his administration over deployment information. As head of the Public Safety Committee at that time, Walsh said she wanted the information about how many officers are on the street any any given time, but the city attorney denied the request, saying it would put officers in danger.

“The Police Department has played games for so many years about where police officers are working and where they are not working,” said Walsh, now the acting chairwoman of the council Public Safety Committee.

“It certainly didn’t start with this administration,” she said. “It started as far back as I can remember.”

While Cummings declined to provide the numbers to The News Journal this week and a Freedom of Information Act request is still pending, he outlined deployment less than a year ago at a budget hearing before City Council.

He said assignments for each of the city’s then-320 sworn law enforcement personnel at the time were:

193 assigned to the uniformed services division

30 on special operations unit

52 to work on criminal investigations

22 to vice

4 in support services

19 in the administrative offices

Since that meeting, the department has announced fluctuations in these deployment numbers. On June 1, it said 25 officers would be put in a new community policing unit, 34 graduates of the Wilmington Police Academy would be assigned to patrol and seven experienced officers would go to a new unit to deal with quality-of-life calls. Fifty-eight officers were assigned to criminal investigations and 20 to the vice unit.

Also, last February, Williams called the cell phone of a lawmaker during a public budget hearing in Dover to complain about comments made by Denn, who apparently had underestimated the number of police on patrol shifts.

Williams told the lawmaker that an average of 25 officers patrol the city, with nine typically assigned to each of the city's three sectors at any given time.

Harold Bozeman, president of the Wilmington FOP, didn't respond to requests for comment, but Fred Calhoun, president of the state Fraternal Order of Police, said the data about deployment is not a secret.

Calhoun said it does not jeopardize safety. “It makes the community feel safe," he said. "I bet if you call every agency, they would tell you.”

Dennis Jay Kenney, a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at John Jay College, agreed.

“There is no reason why that information should be secret,” he said. “That suggests that the numbers don’t look very good.”

Specialized units, such as counter-terrorism or undercover officers, are the only deployments that could be sensitive to release, Haberfeld said.

“It’s a public institution, and it’s paid for by taxpayers money,” she said. “Taxpayers have the right to know how their taxes are allocated.”

Officials in Dover agreed that releasing the data doesn’t put their officers in jeopardy.

Dover police spokesman Mark Hoffman provided the information in a 10-minute phone conversation with The News Journal this week, breaking down the 91 sworn officers by unit. He said there are 48 officers assigned to patrol, with 12 on every patrol shift.

In addition, there are nine detectives and two supervisors, six officers in the drugs, vice and crime units, six officers in the street crimes unit, and 10 sworn personnel in positions not publicly visible, including in administrative offices.

Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen said if the committee had requested that information from him he would have given it over without a thought because the legislators are providing much needed funding to help fight crime in the city, and therefore, deserve to know how the money will be spent.

Christiansen said he is proud of the work he has done since coming into office to cut the number of police officers on desk duty.

Many duties formerly performed by sworn officers, such as evidence control, sex offender registry, supply chain and IT services, are civilian positions now, Hoffman said.

Lawmakers weigh in

Williams initially said he would go before the Joint Finance Committee to make his case for removing the conditions on Wilmington next week, but now lawmakers say Williams is not scheduled to attend the Joint Fiance Committee, which has been rescheduled for later this month.

Sen. Harris McDowell, co-chairman of the JFC, said he and his co-chair will, instead, have a conference call with Williams.

The Democrat representing North Wilmington is reluctant, however, to hear Williams' arguments. He believes that the decision has already been made by the committee so there is no reason they should have to reconsider.

"We have dealt with the issue," he said. "I'm not in the habit of rehashing issues that have been hashed out thoroughly."

​Rep. Melanie George Smith, D-Bear, co-chairwoman of the committee, said she is more optimistic about working with Williams to resolve the issue.

“It would be my hope that the Joint Finance Committee and the mayor are able to work together to find a solution so that the money that we appropriated is used to help the mayor and the police department to fight crime,” she said. “Because that would be a win-win for everybody.”

State Sen. Brian Bushweller, D-Dover, who sits on the JFC, said violence in Wilmington impacts the entire state. There have been long-standing questions about whether the city police department deploys its officers in the most cost effective way or if too many officers are on desk duty rather than on the street, he said.

“Personally, I don’t know whether the city of Wilmington has too many officers on desk work,” Bushweller said. “Personally, I would like to know.”

If a resolution cannot be reached between the committee members and Wilmington officials, it is possible that the money could be reallocated to something else, Bushweller said.

Questioning the funds

Williams has also expressed concern about the $1.5 million being shrouded by ongoing litigation. The Delaware Community Reinvestment Action Council Inc., a consumer advocacy nonprofit, has sued the state in the Court of Chancery, claiming the settlement money is being misused.

The suit is seeking relief from the state over its use of about $5 million of a $31.6 million settlement with Bank of America, as well as an injunction against the state from using the remainder of the money in the upcoming budget year. The suit says the money should be used to counter some of the harm done during the mortgage crises.

“(This) funding has already received criticism and faces litigation in reference to its original purpose and has caused an upset within state government about its allocation outside of the budgetary process,” Williams said in a statement.

The money also has become controversial because of the General Assembly's Republican leaders claiming the JFC and Denn should not be able to negotiate a deal over the use of the money without a vote from the state House and Senate.

Denn has said the settlement funds are held by the Attorney General's Office and can be spent under an agreement between his office and the JFC.

At the root of this dispute lies a chance to increase the amount of community interaction that city police officers have with residents.

Cummings and Denn have both touted the success of foot patrol operations over the last year saying not only do they provide valuable information to officers but give residents a sense of confidence and trust in them.

Cummings has said he hopes to roll out more foot patrol hours during officers’ regular shifts in the coming year. Last year much of the shoe leather was shed on special operations.

The department rolled out Operation Disrupt last year, which took more than 20 officers off of desk duty and put them on patrol to flood high crime areas, a strategy that worked to lower violence in the city’s most dangerous areas. As overtime costs skyrocketed, the operation ended in favor of a Community Policing Unit, which at times includes foot patrols.

Calhoun, the FOP president, said foot patrol assignments encapsulate the reason many officers get into policing in the first place – to improve their community.

“When we took this job, we took it to help people,” Calhoun said. “They want to be out there because at the end of the assignment they know it made the community safer.”

Calhoun said from his experience with officers it doesn’t matter if the assignment is on overtime or part of their regular patrol, as long as they feel supported and safe in the field, officers enjoy interacting with the community.

Studies about foot patrols have shown that while they do frequently improve community and police relations, they are not as effective in reducing crime long term.

Haberfeld said conducting police saturation in areas where there is drug dealing, prostitution or gang activity can initially reduce crime, even in the weeks or months after the saturation ends, but it is not a long-term solution. Instead, police departments need to be properly staffed to interact and show a presence in the community, she said.

Jaehn Dennis, president of the Vandever Avenue Civic Association, said Williams should turn over the data lawmakers are asking for. And, if a state takeover of the police is a key to fixing the city's crime problem, he would support it.

"It's not about him. It's about the community; it's about stopping the shootings and saving the city," he said. "You've got companies, day cares, homeowners that are leaving the city. So if a state take over is what it takes, then I'm for it. If it is something that is proven to work, then why not?"

Contact Jessica Masulli Reyes at 302-324-2777 or jmreyes@delawareonline.com or twitter @JessicaMasulli. Contact Jenna Pizzi at jpizzi@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2837. Follow her on Twitter @JennaPizzi.