The Eugene City Council made modest improvements to an ordinance it passed Monday that will allow municipal judges to ban from downtown people who are accused of committing crimes. But the so-called "downtown public safety zone" remains a fundamentally flawed and inadequate approach to dealing with the downtown's crime problems.
If the City Council is serious about combating downtown crime, it must find a way to put more officers on the street who are in close, frequent contact with the businesses, employees, visitors and others - including the undesirables who frequent the city center. That's called community policing, and despite its proven success in other communities, it's been a long-term municipal goal that Eugene frustratingly has failed to make reality.
Eugene also must work with other communities, in particular its increasingly independent metro neighbor Springfield, to find ways to rebuild Lane County's going-going-gone public safety system. Without more police officers, prosecutors, jail and treatment beds, parole and probation officers and a functioning juvenile justice system that has the capacity to provide both consequence and counseling, city officials will resort to patch jobs such as public safety zones that either will fail to curb downtown crime or shift it to other parts of the city.
The council voted 5-3 to approve an ordinance that will allow someone to be excluded from a 20-square-block area of downtown for 90 days without first being convicted of a crime - if a judge decides that a "preponderance of evidence" indicates a suspect is guilty. Conviction would result in a one-year ban.
The new ordinance is a mild improvement over an earlier proposal, which included a disturbingly broad list of charges that could lead to expulsion. In response to Mayor Kitty Piercy's concerns, Councilors Mike Clark and Andrea Ortiz revised their proposal to allow judges to exclude people only if they commit drug crimes or criminal mischief in the downtown core - a welcome change from their earlier shotgun approach.
A council majority acceded to Clark's last-minute push to expand the ordinance by adding assault, harassment, intimidation, providing alcohol to a minor and public urination and defecation to the list of ban-triggering crimes. That's smaller than the original list, but it still gives authorities excessive leeway to exclude more than hard-core offenders engaged in serious criminal activities.
At Piercy's urging, Clark and Ortiz also included a provision that sunsets the ordinance in two years unless the council votes to extend it. City officials should resolve to provide the traditional law enforcement in the city center that renders the public-safety-zone strategy unnecessary before that sunset date arrives.
Despite such positive changes, the ordinance remains an unsatisfactory fix. The idea of banning people before they are actually found guilty is particularly troublesome, especially since preconviction expulsions will be handled through new civil proceedings in which there will be no requirement that defendants be provided legal representation.
It also is unclear whether the city has the resources available for enforcement. Given the space crunch at the jail, it remains to be seen if a quick spin through the jail's infamous "revolving door" will prove a sufficient deterrent.
Downtown Eugene's crime problems are real and pervasive. City officials justifiably are eager to address the concerns of merchants and others who have become frustrated and too often fearful of the drug activity, harassment, assaults and other problems that are endemic downtown.
But these merchants, customers, downtown employees and other city residents deserve real law enforcement, not a public safety patch job.
