Shortly after taking the reins of the Metropolitan Police Department, Chief Charles H. Ramsey complained to the editor and publisher of this newspaper that Washington, D.C., is "the meeting-est town I've ever seen."

At the time, Ramsey was in the midst ofan exhausting, whirlwind attempt to personally address every one of the hundreds of neighborhood groups and government entities that hold regularly scheduled meetings to discuss public safety issues in the District of Columbia.

The chief's criticism - from a newcomer's perspective, at the time - was on target then and continues to be now.

Many frustrated community activists would readily agree that so much time and energy get expended discussing complaints at meetings across this city that it's difficult for government officials and ordinary citizens to find the necessary time and energy to get anything accomplished - other than holding meetings.

The recent decision to revise the police department's officer deployment strategy gives Chief Ramsey a golden opportunity to help break this cycle.

However, the proposal to realign MPD's Patrol Service Areas with the D.C. Office of Planning's 39 "neighborhood clusters" - announced May 10 at Mayor Anthony A. Williams' Crime Summit - stands little chance of resolving many residents' complaints about the current PSA system.

While more than halving the current 83 assigned patrol areas will certainly put more police officers in each PSA, presumably making them more visible, the proposal aligns police duties with neighborhood boundaries that, in many cases, seem artificially conceived and driven more by developers' desires than citizens' traditional routines and needs.

Instead, MPD should align its PSAs with the city's 37 Advisory Neighborhood Commission boundaries. Police officers are regularly called on to attend ANC meetings, and some ANCs already combine their monthly meetings with monthly PSA meetings. Aligning ANCs and PSAs would

• more clearly define city service boundaries for citizens;
• eliminate the need for dozens of monthly community meetings;
• allow better coordination and cooperation in neighborhood service delivery;
• empower elected, nonpartisan neighborhood representatives to demand effective policing for their constituents;
• provide greater accountability to the citizenry when police fail to perform.

The biggest problem with the mayor's neighborhood service boundaries - and a major reason why the mayor's Neighborhood Action initiative has lost steam and simply caused confusion for many residents - is the administration's failure to make those areas coincide with the ANCs.

Sidestepping the ANCs in this process may have been an intentional political act by the mayor - akin to the apparent preference of most D.C. City Council members to shun interaction with commissioners, lest they gain political power and become eventual challengers. But there is no accountability to the citizenry built into the mayor's plan.

A community policing system that inherently fails to empower citizens to take action when their government fails them is itself doomed to fail. Aligning the PSAs with ANCs would provide a much-needed level of accountability.

Copyright 2003, The Common Denominator