By Elizabeth Cook

editor@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — City residents have high expectations for police.

Quick response. Understanding. Visibility. Security. Mutual respect. Integrity.

And, as one person at a Community Action Planning Session said Thursday night at Livingstone College, they want to be able to communicate with police officers without drawing attention.

“If I call the sheriff and they come to my house, that puts me in danger,” a woman said in the session’s public-safety breakout group.

Rumors fly when a squad car parks in front of your house, they said.

Residents will have another opportunity to talk about expectations and goals from 10 a.m. to noon today at the Civic Center, 315 Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. S., during the third Community Action Planning Session.

The city planned the series of meetings so residents could help develop action items in four subject areas: public safety, community relations, youth activities and workforce development.

About 100 residents attended the first session on Monday at the Wallace Educational Forum.

Some 70 people — including several Livingstone students — came to the Thursday session.

Talk around the public-safety table quickly turned to staffing the Police Department. After coming up with a long list of expectations for police, the residents acknowledged that not much in the way of extra training and activities can happen until the force gets more manpower. Staffing has dropped 20 percent after a stream of departures and retirements.

With Rowan County Sheriff Kevin Auten and Police Chief Jerry Stokes chiming in, the small group agreed on two goals:

• By 2018, get Police Department staffing to 85 to 90 percent.

• By 2020, get staffing to 95 to 100 percent.

As manpower increases, the department should work on community outreach and finding ways to “humanize the badge,” as one person said, by doing such things as partnering with schools on a public-safety event.

Stokes said filling the positions is his responsibility. What, he asked, can the community could do to help?

Khadijah Allen, a Livingstone sophomore from Minnesota, suggested training more community groups like the Campus Emergency Team that she is a member of at the college.

Training enough people to have teams citywide could be a challenge, Stokes said. More engaged and active Community Watch groups could be an option, he said.

That fit with the earlier comment about how to communicate with police. Group leader Liliana Spears said she had called the Police Department to report suspicious activity without having sirens come blaring into the neighborhood.

Maybe that’s something needed to improve public safety in the city, she said — resident training on how to report situations that look sketchy. The CrimeStoppers group takes anonymous tips that might lead to an arrest and conviction, but residents also want to help with prevention.

Relationships came up frequently in the public-safety discussion. People said they would like to talk to officers one-on-one and get to know them.

“In their defense, they are willing to come,” said one woman, who explained that officers had visited her church so kids could meet them in a comfortable setting.

Stokes said after the meeting that he felt good about improvements in salaries for his department. Beginning pay for Salisbury officers has risen to $34,000 a year. If another salary boost proposed by City Council goes through for the next budget year, pay will start at just under $40,000, Stokes said.

That’s still below what Stokes calls “the big boy on the block” — Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, which starts officers at $42,000, he said. But $39,000 and change nearly levels the recruiting field, according to Stokes.

“If we’re able to do that, we’ll beat Greensboro and everyone else in our market,” the chief said.

Other group goals developed Thursday night included:

• Opportunities for children: Create a framework to pull together all the mentoring programs run by churches, colleges and other groups in the city.

• Workforce development: Form a partnership among schools, colleges and the city to disrupt the school-to-jail pipeline and reinforce the school-to-workforce pipeline.

• Community relations: Develop an ambassadors program for different communities in the city and create a unity celebration that focuses on something distinctive to Salisbury that everyone can be excited about.

Livingstone students in attendance said they hope the session will lead to a good relationship with police and the city at large. Three freshmen said the meeting was a start.

Michael Phifer said if he is going to be in Salisbury for four years, he wants to be involved. “I feel like it starts with us, to make a change for the better,” Phifer said.

Tymecha Wiseman some students don’t like or are afraid of police, and she found the session helpful. She would feel safer, she said, if there were more surveillance.  “I think they should have more cameras,” she said.

Johneese Ferguson, who participated with Wiseman in the public-safety discussion, said the next step is important for the city. “I just really hope and pray it really takes action,” she said.

Facilitator Barbara Anderson said at the outset that the city needs to take concrete steps. Past efforts at community planning came up with ideals such as mentoring, parent involvement, community awareness, and jobs and training, but no specific goals were set.

The purpose of the planning sessions is to set goals for 2018 and 2020, she said — specific, achievable, measurable goals, Anderson said.

“If you don’t set a goal, it’s not going to happen,” she said.