Chief Michael Sullivan, who took the helm at the embattled police agency in September, announced the new plan on Monday. In a news release, the agency called its crime-fighting strategy "victim centered" and "evidence based" and promised that it would "drive down violent crime by 5% and property crime by 8%."
It's unclear how the agency came up with those numbers — or in what time frame Phoenicians can expect those reductions. Nor does the plan contain much in the way of specifics about the policy changes the department is implementing to reach those drops in crime.
It has also inspired scrutiny from some local criminal justice advocates, who argued that the plan does little to address the long-standing problems with the police department. The agency is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice over its use of violent force.
"Chief Sullivan is trying to claim this approach is 'sustainable, comprehensive and meaningful.' It’s not," Shalae Flores, a spokesperson for Poder in Action, wrote in a statement the organization released on Wednesday.
"A billion-dollar police budget isn’t sustainable, handcuffs as the only option isn’t comprehensive, and flooding a community with cops isn’t meaningful when we aren’t attending to housing, food and youth programs," Flores continued.
Poder in Action and other local organizations have protested the city's plans to raise the Phoenix police budget to nearly $1 billion in the coming year. The agency has justified the spending by saying at least some of the increase is funding new civilian positions in the department.
Chief Michael Sullivan has released two vague plans since taking over the department in September.
Matt Hennie
Plan offers vague focus areas
Sullivan's new crime reduction plan is centered around four strategic points: "the most violent people," "the most active places," "prohibited possessors" and "violent offenders with outstanding arrest warrants."The nine-page document promises that the agency will concentrate its resources on those focus areas. It also lays out principles of "data- and intelligence-driven policing" and "commitment to continual improvement and evaluation," though does not go into detail about what that will look like in practice.
The document also does not indicate clearly what aspects of the plan are changes to current department strategy, and a department spokesperson did not return an inquiry from Phoenix New Times about that question.
To support the need for the new strategy, data in the plan indicates that homicides had risen nearly 40% from 2017 to 2022. However, the plan also claims that property crime had decreased by 5% in that period, although the numbers detailed in the plan show that property crime had actually decreased by 21%.
A police spokesperson did not reply to an inquiry about that discrepancy.
"What the data says to me is that regardless of how many cops there are or what the police budget is, it’s not having an impact on crime. It says to me that we need a different type of response to community safety," Flores said.
The new crime-reduction plan's lack of specifics is similar to a proposal Sullivan unveiled in November to reform the troubled agency. That plan also centered around several vague bullet points.
Since the beginning of the year, Phoenix police officers have shot and killed seven people. And despite claims that the department has a shortage of cops, a dozen squad cars were available last week when officers arrested an unsheltered man who refused to leave his home in the homeless encampment known as the Zone.
