The Salem Police Department is months aways from disbanding its units for community engagement and crisis response, freeing up those officers to handle time-consuming investigations. For around 25 years, Salem police’s community action unit has deployed officers on bicycles downtown and sent them to participate in youth programs and community events. The agency’s behavioral health unit has also paired officers with mental health workers to respond to crisis calls. The team has existed in some form since 2014. Salem police will end both of those teams on Jan. 1, 2025, according to Chief Trevor Womack. He notified the Salem City Manager’s Office of the change around two weeks ago. “This is a terrible, difficult decision to make,” Womack said in an interview. City Manager Keith Stahley told Salem Reporter that he agreed with the chief’s plans and “encouraged him to proceed.” He otherwise didn’t comment on the decision to disband the units.  The cuts don’t come as a surprise. Womack in recent years has scaled back the number of officers on each team in response to service demands, which have grown over the last 15 years along with the city’s population.  The chief has said at previous Salem City Council and budget committee meetings that his agency’s staffing hasn’t kept up with growing population and needs. Womack said that the city’s rising violent crime, growing homeless population and record-breaking year for fatal collisions have all raised that demand. The community action unit had eight sworn officers at its height pre-Covid. Since then, officers either retired or moved to a different position in the agency as part of an annual bidding process to transfer assignments. Their positions weren’t filled due to a lack of patrol officers.  Another officer is departing from the team in January, which would leave just four. “At half-strength, the diminished team can no longer efficiently function, and the four remaining positions are needed on patrol,” according to Salem police spokeswoman Angela Hedrick. There is a perception among Salem residents that downtown Salem is unsafe, according to TJ Sullivan, president of the Salem Main Street Association. The news of a diminished police presence will contribute to the narrative that downtown stakeholders are trying to combat, Sullivan said. “That’s a bad thing for business in downtown.” He said that seeing officers on bicycles downtown instantly makes people feel safer.  “Their ability to get into different parts of downtown quickly also can’t be understated,” he said. Sullivan said that he’s asked Mayor-Elect Julie Hoy to prioritize reassigning officers downtown once she takes office. The public engagement that the community action team focused on won’t disappear altogether. But Womack said that work will be more difficult, as officers will need to be pulled from patrol or work overtime. An independent assessment completed in 2021 recommended that the agency engage more with youth. Since then, the community action unit has partnered with the Boys & Girls Club, Kroc Center and YMCA for youth programs, such as playing basketball with kids once a week.  The team often helped address unmanaged homeless encampments and other non-emergency reports. Womack said that downtown Salem is going to lose the team that’s been readily available to respond to lower-level crimes. The chief made several calls on Monday to business owners and downtown stakeholders, notifying them of the change. When citizens have reported nuisance properties, the community action unit has been available to immediately work with neighborhood associations and property owners to stop the problem from worsening, according to Hedrick. The team also frequently monitored or staffed special events downtown and at Riverfront Park. Womack said he hopes to one day rebuild a similar team that provides more than emergency response, especially in areas of northeast and downtown Salem that the agency has identified as hotspots for gun violence. He said the community needs more positive police presence, whether it’s officers participating in peace walks or handing out frozen treats at neighborhood events. The community action team originally started with funding through the Salem Area Mass Transit District, also known as Cherriots, and was later expanded with funds from the city’s Downtown Parking District. Such funding streams have disappeared over the years. Womack said that’s put more burden on the main police department budget, primarily paid for by property taxes, and made it harder to keep those positions. “There’s a long story here, and this is just kind of the tail end of the final result,” he said. Meantime, Salem police’s behavioral health team has already been whittled down to just one officer. The unit previously paired three officers with qualified mental health professionals employed by Marion County. But Womack reassigned two of those officers back to patrols last year after the federal grant paying for that work was no longer available to crisis response programs that involve police. Such officers were specially trained to handle calls for service involving people experiencing crises.  The one remaining officer also helped train other officers in crisis intervention. “His reassignment to patrol will lead to a reduced training schedule and limited future availability,” Hedrick said. Womack said that his agency will continue dispatching patrol officers to incidents involving behavioral health issues, as it has mostly done since losing the previous grant funding. He said patrol officers are trained in and capable of handling crisis calls using de-escalation skills when needed. The biggest loss in disbanding the team is the liaison role of the officers when following up on more complex cases, according to the chief. Hedrick said that the benefit of pairing officers with mental health workers was that they could together determine the type of crisis stabilization needed, connect the person to resources and services, and in some cases follow up with a case manager who could continue helping the person. They also worked with service providers and Marion County’s behavioral health prosecutor to help people with severe needs get the services they need and avoid cycling in and out of the hospital and jail, Womack said. The qualified mental health professionals who worked with the officers were county employees. After the funding changes, they were reassigned to the “community response team,” which pairs mental health workers with addiction recovery mentors to respond to some crisis calls instead of police, according to Ryan Matthews, Marion County’s Health And Human Services administrator. That team started operating in January and responds throughout Marion County 24 hours a day, including in Salem. When Womack first took over as police chief in December 2020, he determined that the city needed 80 patrol officers. But he said the agency has never been able to maintain that number during the time that he’s been there, which has created a “constant struggle” of whether to fill specialized positions or keep patrols staffed. His agency in recent years has cut down its communications team to one spokesperson and removed its team dedicated to auto theft, which Womack said is steadily increasing. The city has also had a longtime goal of 1.5 police officers per 1,000 people. But in 20 years, that figure has never gone higher than 1.29 in 2008. It’s currently at 1.07, according to Salem police data. Salem police received around 112,000 calls per year between 2021 and 2023, according to Hedrick. “However, it’s important to remember that calls for service is one thing and the intensity of certain types of calls and crime and the personnel they require are quite another,” she said. Investigations into violent crime and fatal collisions pull officers from several units to respond. Fatal crashes also require weeks of follow up by the traffic team, “which hinders them from being out doing their regular work, proactive enforcement and trying to honor the requests from residents to enforce traffic safety issues all around the city,” Hedrick said. So far this year, 19 people have died in collisions in Salem. That’s compared with 13 last year and 17 in 2022. Last year, Salem police cut four vacant positions – two officers, a lieutenant and a sergeant. “The police department will no longer have the ability to conduct high-level drug trafficking cases that distribute illicit narcotics,” according to a list of proposed budget cuts for last year. “Additionally, it will impact the department’s ability to investigate federal overdose cases criminally and hold the suppliers of deadly narcotics accountable for their distribution to adults and children alike.” As the budget process begins later this year, Womack said he intends to seek grant funding to expand his agency’s work. That will include pushing forward the Community Violence Reduction Initiative, a joint effort by Salem-area law enforcement agencies to scale back escalating deadly violence with the help of community organizations.  The effort comes after a city report last fall found that shootings in Salem had doubled in recent years, and the number of teens arrested for serious assaults had tripled. In the next budget cycle, 10 officers, a graffiti abatement position and a telephone reporting specialist could all be on the chopping block to save the city around $2.5 million. That would be in addition to deep cuts to other city departments. “Those would be devastating to our ability to provide services,” Womack said. “It’s just going to be a further retraction away from anything proactive and community policing to core services and emergency response, which we’ll do well. No matter what, we will do that as best as we possibly can. But there is a cost for not being able to do proactive, preventative work for the community.” Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053. A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE– If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. Work such as this, done by local professionals, depends on community support from subscribers. Please take a moment and sign up now – easy and secure: SUBSCRIBE. The post Salem police cutting downtown, behavioral health teams appeared first on Salem Reporter.