“The hospital has fulfilled its goal to stabilize these neighborhoods, and we feel area residents will be well-served going forward by police staffing levels provided by the Dayton Police Department that are typical in other Dayton neighborhoods,” said Mark Shaker, president of Miami Valley Hospital.
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The community-based police program has helped deter and solve crimes and made the surrounding areas safer, which is why the neighborhood is searching for other funding to keep it intact, according to some local neighborhood and community representatives.
“We in South Park strongly believe that this program should continue and that a decline in the excellent police service that we rely upon will be detrimental to our neighborhood and the surrounding area,” said Matthew Klempner, president of Historic South Park Inc.
In 1998, the hospital and Dayton Police Department’s second district formed a “Good Neighbor Partnership” that placed two police officers in the Fairgrounds and South Park areas.
In the late 1990s, rooming houses and transient residents outnumbered homes and homeowners in the Fairgrounds Neighborhood. Crime was higher in the area.
The city of Dayton, the University of Dayton and Miami Valley Hospital teamed up to make investments to eliminate blight, build new housing, improve home-ownership rates, redevelop the Brown Street business corridor and eliminate crime.
The effort was called the Genesis Project. It included the hiring of two full-time Dayton police officers, whose jobs partly were to build relationships with residents, businesses and other citizens in the Fairgrounds, Old South Park, South Park and Rubicon business districts.
Officers attended community meetings, security meetings with hospital leadership and security, and engaged in targeted enforcement to try to stem any crime trends.
According to data from the Dayton Police Department, the number of incidents in the entire Genesis Project area fell to 935 in 2016, down 35 percent from 2007. In parts of the area the number of crimes fell by 70 percent, hospital officials say.
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The hospital, city and Dayton Police Department have worked closely for decades and will continue to do so, and the hospital and city will monitor the situation moving forward, said Shaker.
Local neighborhood leaders praised the hospital for spending millions of dollars over the years to improve local neighborhoods and make them safer.
Miami Valley footed the bill for the police program for 19 years.
The hospital agreed to pay the city as much as $654,000 for the community-based police services between 2016 and 2018, according to a contract with the city of Dayton. The hospital had the right to terminate the contract at any time as long as it gave 90-day written notice. The contract ends on March 1.
Hospital officials during a meeting with South Park representatives said they are terminating funding for the program because of difficult financial constraints, the reduction in crime in the area and the recent passage of Dayton’s income tax hike, said Klempner.
New revenue from Dayton’s tax increase will pay for additional police officers across the city.
But the community-based officers are well known in the neighborhoods and they help with crime prevention and follow up on problems that cannot be resolved in a single visit, Klempner said.
The neighborhood wants this program to continue and will reach out to other institutions and look for other potential funding sources to keep it going, he said.
“In the past few months, we’ve seen great progress in addressing opioid-related crime due entirely to the cooperation of the (community-based officers) and residents,” Klempner said. “With all the progress that has been made, it would be a shame to end this successful program.”
The program has been very successful, but paying for police officers can be expensive and the hospital is a business, said Dayton police Maj. Brian Johns, commander of the East Patrol Operations Division.
The neighborhoods are much safer today than they have been in the past, and the police department will continue to use community-based policing strategies to deter and solve crimes and officers will continue to communicate and work with Premier Health, which is a community partner, he said.
The two officers will continue to work in East Dayton and they will still spend some of their time in South Park and Fairgrounds neighborhoods, he said.
The police department’s budget was increased $163,000 for 2017 to reassign the officers to the East Patrol Operations Divisions, according to city documents.
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