More off-duty police officers will be patrolling the streets of the Hurstville neighborhood after a vote Wednesday night by the security district to boost the amount of money going to patrols.
By a 6-0 vote, the board of the Hurstville Security District voted for a $20,000 increase in the patrol budget, raising it from $195,000 to $215,000 in the coming year. The additional money will not be allocated to any specific new type of patrol, but rather simply to deploy additional manpower as the off-duty officers see fit.
“The more we invest in the policing, the better off we are, whether it’s the time or the intensity,” said board member Alan Philipson.
The district had been paying the officers for 15 hours of patrols per day with the proceeds of a fee on each of the more than 750 parcels within Hurstville’s boundaries, which run roughly from Nashville Avenue to Jefferson Avenue between Magazine Street and Loyola Avenue but includes a handful of other adjacent blocks. Better-than-expected collections had led to a sizeable surplus, however, which board members felt was better used for patrols than merely accumulated.
“Do we want to spend all the money we’re going to collect?” board chairman George Young asked at the beginning of Wednesday night’s meeting. “I’d like to to spend as much as we can take in.”
Board members had previously considered using the surplus to extend the patrol time by an extra hour per day. Lt. Carl Perriloux, who schedules the off-duty patrols, told the board Wednesday that Hurstville has little in the way of crime patterns that need additional attention other than the occasional theft from an unlocked car – which Perriloux attributed to people passing through the neighborhood on foot.
The additional money would thus be more effective for bringing on extra officers when large events, such as high school football games or Halloween night, draw a lot of extra traffic to the neighborhood, the board decided, so they chose to leave the deployment of the extra man-hours to Perriloux’s discretion.
“We decided a long time ago not to micromanage. Everyone has different ideas about when crime happens, when they’re vulnerable,” Young said, recalling that the times he’d have wanted extra security when his children were in college, for example, likely differed from the wishes of parents of young children. “As an officer, [Perriloux] knows what’s going on.”
At Perriloux’s request, the board also approved a policy change in favor of following the city’s practice of paying overtime to officers who work on the city’s 11 official holidays.
The Hurstville budget must be approved by the city council, so that will be the final step toward approving the increase, noted Shelley Landrieu, executive director of the Hurstville Security District and several others.
The terms of several board members are set to expire this year, but the nominations to replace or renew them must come from a meeting of the security district’s sibling organization, the Hurstville Neighborhood Improvement District. A meeting for that purpose has been set for 7 p.m. Dec. 9 at Isidore Newman School, 1903 Jefferson Ave.
