By Rebecca Robinson

North Portland residents packed the pews at Life Fellowship church on North Lombard Street Wednesday night to express their concerns about crime to the city's top-level public safety officials.

Police Chief Rosie Sizer, Police Commissioner Dan Saltzman, Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk, and a host of other leaders from the Portland Police Bureau and the Office of Neighborhood Involvement's Crime Prevention program were on hand to field questions from residents who have become increasingly uneasy with what they perceive to be the increase in crime and decrease in police presence on North Portland streets.

Arbor Lodge Neighborhood Association Chair Chris Duffy moderated the meeting, collecting and reading aloud questions for officials written by citizens on notecards and interjecting a few sentiments of her own into the conversation. She kicked the evening off by praising the Northern neighborhoods, and asking for answers from the officials seated onstage.

"Your presence here is representative of the fact that you care about the livability of your community," said Duffy to the standing-room-only crowd. To the officials, she said, "We think it's reasonable to expect a one-on-one response from our police and our Commissioner and an ongoing dialogue between the city and the community." Then, she turned it over to the badges at the Bureau.

Sizer began by tackling the thorny issue of the PPB budget, including the 3 percent cut in the last fiscal year that led to the consolidation of five police precincts into three. She noted that the precinct reconfiguration had allowed PPB to put more officers on the street, which had in turn led to shorter response times across the city. And she touched upon one silver lining of the economic downturn.

" A bad economy is a good sign for police hiring and recruiting," said Sizer. "Suddenly, a civil service job looks highly appealing to people. We're now as close to full staffing as we have been since 2000."

This year's budget is subject to $2.8 million in cuts, according to Sizer. While the dollar amount is large, it represents 2 percent of the Bureau's budget, and therefore a smaller cut than last year.

North Precinct Commander Jim Ferraris peppered his presentation with statistics that painted a generally rosy picture of crime and policing in the precinct. The number of police officers in the new North Precinct has increased by 12 over the combined number of officers in the old North and North Precinct, countering the public perception that there are fewer officers than there used to be.

He dismissed the recent spikes in neighborhoods like Overlook and St. Johns as "ebbs and flows" that didn't change the reality that overall crime is down. He noted that the crime rates in those and other North and Northeast neighborhoods had been driven by two or three prolific offenders, and once they were apprehended, crime in their targeted areas plummeted.

Saltzman reiterated his priorities for the Bureau – among them hiring up to full capacity, increasing diversity in staff, reduce child abuse and domestic violence – and pointed out that "Typically we see crime increase in an economic downturn. But crime is going down."

Schrunk, who grew up on the Peninsula, played up his North Portland roots as he introduced himself - "I think I see my old physics teacher in the audience," he quipped – and stressed his deep investment in the community seated before him. He urged citizens to "not give up" and contribute fresh ideas to leaders.

"The public safety system is too important to be left to professionals," said Schrunk.

Then came the community questions. The public didn't pull any punches.

Among the inquiries Duffy read back to the officials were "Why is the patrol car I used to see three to four times a day now only there once a week?", "Why did nobody respond to a neighbor's 911 call about a break-in?", "Why has my neighborhood police officer only attended two out of the past 12 neighborhood association meetings?," and numerous other variations on a theme: "What's happened to community policing?"

Duffy noted, as PPB leadership has, that perception was a huge part of the problem.

"No matter what the numbers seem to be on paper, people are not seeing our police on the streets," said Duffy. "The police are dashing from one end of the Peninsula to East County and back again, and people are not getting day-to-day communication with officers they expect to see on the street."

Ferraris addressed the issue of absent patrol cars, in response to an anecdote from an unnamed Overlook business owner who arrived at the scene of a crime she called in before a patrol officer because there was nobody patrolling her district.

While each patrol district is assigned its own officer, on occasion certain patrol districts have to be "zeroed out" due to an emergency elsewhere or a sick or vacationing officer, and their officers moved to a district that has received more calls for police assistance.

"The goal is not to, but from time to time we have to," said Ferraris, who acknowledged the need to "take this back to the Precinct and have a conversation amongst ourselves about being more visible."

Sizer said that the bigger picture of public safety was crucial for the public to understand.

"[Multnomah County] has 30 percent fewer jail beds than eight years ago, and fewer parole and probation officers," said Sizer. "We're only as good as the rest of the team, and the rest of the team have suffered massively."

Schrunk added that from a criminal justice standpoint, "the cut in probation officers is a huge part of the problem." Fewer officers means less oversight, he argued, and thus more criminals who get released back on the streets early and are likely to offend again.

"We need more eyes on the whole public safety system," said Schrunk, joining others onstage in encouraging citizens to participate in the budget process and advocate for PPB and the DA's office.

Before adjourning the meeting, North Portland Crime Prevention Coordinator Mark Wells echoed this sentiment, quoting the 19th-century British Police Commander Robert Peel and summing up the meeting's message:

"The police are the public and the public are the police."