The recent mayhem in the downtown nightclub district has brought a promise of a greater police presence this coming weekend—and talk of a revival of officers “holding down” extra-duty bar gigs.
Those latest developments follow a particularly eventful two nights in the Crown-Chapel-Center Street nightclub district. As many as four floating fights broke out, and two men were shot as the bars let out early Saturday. The next night, cops discovered another batch of underaged drinkers at Exhibit X (formerly known as Center Street Lounge); then, when the bars let out around 2 a.m., shots rang out on College Street between Crown and George; an officer who was busy breaking up a fight ran to the scene to chase, and then arrest, the gunman.
That led top cops and union officials to huddle at police headquarters Monday afternoon about next steps.
First decision: In the short term, they will dramatically beef up the number of officers assigned to the district, beginning this weekend. “We’re going to be highly visible in the central entertainment district and along the periphery,” said Lt. Jeff Hoffman, who supervises patrol.
“Downtown’s been safe for a number of years. These types of things happen downtown, and people panic, and rightfully so. Our job is to make sure people are safe. So we have to respond,” added Assistant Chief Luiz Casanova.
Another idea came up at the Monday afternoon meeting: reviving the “hold-downs.”
That’s the practice of allowing a bar owner to choose which extra-duty cops to hire, and then giving those cops an ongoing assignment there.
Mayoral candidates Toni Harp and Justin Elicker separately called for revisiting hold-downs.
The club district operated on extra-duty hold-downs until 2010, when then-Police Chief James Lewis abolished the practice. Lewis said he had never seen a department with such a practice, which he argued left the city vulnerable to a dangerously symbiotic relationship: The cop hired by the club owner would have an incentive to look the other way at wrongdoing in order to keep the gig. Lewis abolished the practice in 2010, angering officers accustomed to the work. Since then, the department has assigned extra-duty jobs on a rotating basis. (Click here to read about the debate at the time.)
The new system produced an unintended consequence: Fewer cops are working extra-duty jobs. That has meant fewer cops in the bar district overall. The city will have to pay for its own overtime cops in the district this weekend to make up for some of the cops who would have been paid privately by bar owners if more were still hiring extra-duty officers as under the old-hold down system.
Part of the problem lies in fewer cops signing up for the extra-duty work.
“The bar owners are telling us they’re calling for extra officers, and they’re not getting anybody. Nobody wants to work it,” police union President Louis Cavaliere Jr. said Monday.
“If you had a hold-down, it was your [regular] assignment. You would get coverage [at the club] no matter if it was Christmas, New Year’s, Easter,” Cavaliere said. Under the new system, he said, officers might be more prone to turn down a one-time gig, figuring, “It’s Sunday. It’s a nice day; I want to spend time with my family.” A hold-down makes the gig “your responsibility. If you can’t work it you have to get someone to fill it. If you can’t get someone to fill it you have no choice. You have to work it. It’s part of yours. You get more pride out of it when you feel you have a little responsibility under your belt.”
City officials offered to bring hold-downs last fall back on a trial basis, not for clubs, but for housing projects. They did so after the third of three murders at Church Street South since the end of hold-downs. Officers previously were able to spend lots of focused time just in the project thanks to hold-downs, and they knew the tenants. In the the third murder, an extra-duty cop had gone home at 7 p.m.; a half-hour later, a 6‑year-old boy was staring at his father’s newly bullet-ridden dead body in a stairwell.
The union at the time rejected the offer for a partial trial return of hold-downs, taking an “all-or-nothing” position. Cavaliere said the practice should return to the club district as well.
Now the topic returned to the table at Monday’s meeting; no decisions were made. Cavaliere said he’d like to see the department reinstate hold-downs.
Officials are making no promises, beyond listening to the arguments. “We have to learn from mistakes in the past. We have to supervise them correctly” if the hold-downs return, Casanova said.
“The hold-downs were similar to community policing, in that you had the same officers working in front of the same place. They were vested in making sure that safety and security were maintained,” argued Win Davis, executive director of the Town Green Special Services District. “Do I think that exact format should come back? No. But I think we need to work on a format that gives our officers familiarity with nightlife policing. That continuity will help to increase safety downtown.”
“I don’t think we’re willing to go back to the way it was,” said city Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts. “We’d definitely be open” to discussing “new ideas” about how to devise a new system taking into account the concerns originally raised by former Chief Lewis.
Both Toni Harp and Justin Elicker, the Democratic and independent candidates for mayor, said they’d like to see that happen. (Both also made sure to point out that they’d look to Chief Dean Esserman to take the lead on the subject.)
Harp proposed a framework for a “modified” hold-down: Bar owners would pay into a general club-district extra-duty fund, so they wouldn’t pay any individual officer directly. They could choose an individual officer to work at the club, but not year-round — perhaps three months at a time.
The goal, she said in an interview Tuesday, is to eliminate the perception that the officer might “look the other way.”
Elicker, too, called on the city to “revisit police hold-down policies with increased supervision to ensure no officers are abusing relationships with club owners.”
He made that call in a press release issued Monday afternoon in response to all the weekend violence.
“Hold-downs will allow more officers to be posted downtown with no additional cost, but critical to a renewed hold-down policy is increasing our ability to supervise officers,” Elicker suggested.
Local and state officials have for years wrestled more broadly with how to tackle the club district’s out-of-control weekend nights. Some of the discussion has centered on hip-hop events, an issue that touches on both racial and public-safety questions. Click on the play arrow and click here and here for more on that.
In his Monday press release, Elicker called for “actively pursu[ing] revocation of liquor licenses for clubs associated with nightclub violence”; increasing fire, building-code, health and state liquor inspections of downtown clubs; give downtown officers “hospitality training”; crack down on parking and motor vehicle offenses in the district in order to “identify illegal weapons and intoxicated drivers” before they end up causing bigger problems; expanding Town Green “ambassador” shifts past 9 p.m.
Police have been exploring some of those ideas, and others, with the Town Green people, state officials, and bar owners in recent weeks.
Win Davis said his current ambassadors aren’t trained to handle those later shifts.
“We would need to look at a different kind of ambassador training and perhaps a different type of ambassador to even consider that kind of a shift,” Davis said. “Our ambassadors are not trained currently to deal with some of the nightlife issues we have seen” such as drunken mobs fighting and shots being fired.