South Side crime grabs attention, IC police divide their time
With police resources already stretched past their limit downtown, the increase in calls coming in from the Iowa City South Side is affecting the department’s ability to provide adequate numbers of officers to both areas.
“This is Los Cocos,” said Iowa City police Officer Brandon Faulkcon late in the evening of April 25, pulling into the parking lot of an old Pizza Hut building at 1921 Keokuk St. As the car’s headlights illuminated the front of the bar, most of the crowd standing outside quickly moved indoors.
Inside the business, two officers with Iowa City’s Street Crimes Action Team stood by a speaker casting wary eyes at the crowd dancing to pounding hip-hop music while bouncers in yellow shirts milled near the door.
“We’ll probably be back,” Faulkcon said later as he pulled away from the establishment.
Authorities agreed there are “significant problems” at bars in the southern part of the city. And new establishments such as Los Cocos, Calientes, and Club Furia — all of which opened or reopened recently — are affecting how police divide their resources.
“Before, how we dealt with downtown was that resources would collapse there, especially around bar close,” Kelsay said. “But we’re not able to hedge our resources because the [southern] cars are equally occupied by other bars.”
Previously, it was rare for police to get late-night calls outside downtown, but police can no longer pull all their resources into one area, even with increased need there, Kelsay said.
Just as in downtown, the South Side bars close between 1:30 and 2 a.m.
During weekend nights, the rove car — the unit that isn’t assigned a particular area of the city — bounces continually between downtown and southern Iowa City, specifically Los Cocos, said Iowa City police Officer Todd Cheney.
At bar closing April 25, cars assigned to other areas of Iowa City converged downtown, while patrol officers and the Street Crimes Action Team kept an eye on the South Side.
“When you have that many officers downtown, it shorts you somewhere else,” said Iowa City police Officer Rob Cash.
Numerous officers agreed understaffing was a major problem in dealing with the southeast side.
“If I had to pick the most dangerous place in Iowa City, this would be it,” Faulkcon said as he drove through the Dolphin Lake Point Enclave Apartments, 2401 Highway 6. “If we get called there, we’ll definitely take two people.”
But Kelsay said characterizing the entire apartment complex in that way is not necessarily fair. While there are certainly individuals with criminal tendencies, he said, the owners are trying to correct many of the problems by hiring security, updating the buildings, and adding clauses to the lease agreements to prevent crime.
Iowa City is divided into four areas for purposes of policing. The boundaries were drawn years ago so each area received an equal number of calls for service. But while that may be true during the day, at night the distribution changes significantly.
And the number of calls doesn’t mean an equal number of officers sent to each call. While a call in the northern or western district of Iowa City may require only one officer, most calls in the southeastern quadrant require numerous officers to respond.
Ultimately, the problem is dividing the department’s resources between downtown and the South Side, police agreed.
And that’s an issue that police aren’t sure how to solve.
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