Lynn Police take to streets on two wheels

LYNN – They’re back!After falling victim to budget cuts, the bike officers have returned to the streets for the next six months after Lynn Police received a state grant.”The mission is to talk to the people, meet the people, stop in the playground and shoot some baskets with the kids, meet with locals and business owners and talk about what is going on, what they need, and what we can do,” Lynn Police Chief Kevin Coppinger said Thursday. “We think it’s going to be good. It started Sunday, and we’ve already identified some of problems right around the downtown area.”The bike officers (officially members of the Community Liaison Team) were a popular part of city policing for years, most recently since 2010 when they became familiar figures pedaling around town in their day-glo fluorescent shirts. They were also credited with proactively addressing many of the smaller “quality of life” issues that upset neighbors. Simply by being available to chat (bike officers do not typically respond to 911 calls, so they don’t have to bolt from a conversation when a call comes in), officers were praised for resolving conflicts, neighborhood complaints, and other issues before police would typically be involved.But a shortfall on state-mandated spending on public schools last year required cuts, including about 5 percent of the police budget. The department’s six CLTs were taken off their bikes and returned to regular duty.The police department annually applies for a state grant, however, that recently awarded $280,902 for the city to add an officer to the drug task force and to return four bike officers to their pedaling, Coppinger said.The grant will pay for four bike officers for the next six months (officially until the Sunday after Halloween). Officers will work from 3 to 11 p.m. each day of the week, so there will always be a minimum of two officers cycling through the city. The officers will be deployed throughout the city (rather than to specific neighborhoods as they were in the recent past), and Coppinger said they will be in the usual “hotspots” according to neighborhood needs.Coppinger said that he doesn’t know if this year’s budget will enable the officers to continue beyond the fall. But he said that he knows Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy supports the program, and if there is any money that can be added to his budget, the bike officers will be a high priority. Meanwhile Coppinger was thankful that the bike officers would be back in the summer months when the program is most effective.Officers Ronald Brown and Titou Kim said Thursday they were glad to be back in their day-glo.”For me, you get to interact more with people out in the open, and you see more stuff and are dealing with more people,” Kim said. “You have more time to interact with people.”