Patrol officer to be dedicated to Ashland Street from Normal Avenue to Exit 14
By Morgan Rothborne, Ashland.news
The Ashland City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to approve the lease for a new police presence on the south side of the city in response to years of increasing crime in the area.
The lease for a 170-square-foot portion of the Suds Ur Duds space in Tolman Creek Plaza at 2345 Ashland St. #103 was listed on the consent agenda for the Tuesday business meeting, but was pulled for discussion in response to a request to comment from Debbie Neisewander.
The city will pay $32,288 to put in a new entrance door and walls to create a new office space, according to the staff report by Police Chief Tighe O’Meara, and pay an initial rate of $1,000 a month rent. It is expected to take about two weeks for the new location to open.
“I don’t see how a cop shop is going to change the way things are going on the south side of town. I think the money could be better utilized hiring additional police, they’re only being given 40 hours a week, which is realistically three 12 hour shifts, I think there really should be more police coverage,” Neiesewander said.
She argued the city should look to Medford’s livability team and its data gathering metrics as a model and submitted the 2022 annual report for the Medford Police to the public record. Pointing to the “Operations Bureau,” page, she stated the city of Ashland should keep such numbers and diversify police outreach.
Councilor Eric Hansen said he believed the additional police presence — one full-time officer will be assigned to the area along Ashland Street between Norman Avenue and Exit 14 for 40 hours a week — seemed like a low cost to the city for the potential benefit.
“We’ve made a commitment to the south side, to increase safety, increase patrols,” he said.
Councilor Dylan Bloom said the problems in the area are not strictly connected to homeless people and the presence of shelters in the area but the Exit 14 entrance to Interstate 5 and accompanying drug trafficking problems.
“(It’s) not about the homeless, it’s about in general that side of town has seen an increase in criminal activity for a long time,” he said.
Hyatt said in viewing the city’s data she was struck by the rate of overdoses occurring in the area.
Councilor Bob Kaplan asked city staff to share the data the city has been collecting with the public. Wednesday, the police data was posted on the end of the city’s page for the emergency shelter.
The data is broken into graphs and charts for the two CAP (Concentrated Area Patrol) in the city. Despite common reference to north and south sides of town, the CAPS are defined as East and West — West in the downtown area and East between Normal Street and Exit 14.
In the first quarter of 2019, the East CAP saw 70 calls while in the fourth quarter of 2023 there were 200 calls. Trespass calls totaled 72 in 2019 and 238 in 2023.
Records show Ashland police didn’t respond to any overdose calls in the East CAP in 2019 and 2020, then two in 2021, six in 2022 and nine in 2023.
“It is the department’s hope that having a marked and known police office in the area will bring a decrease to the negative behavior in the area. This will also give business owners and community members alike a place to locate a police officer in the area,” Chief O’Meara’s staff report said.
The police department’s office in the West CAP, located for more than 10 years in a small building near the corner of Main and Water streets across from the Ashland Plaza, is now in City Hall. The city was paying just under $1,000 a month rent for what it called the “contact office” space before the move into a city-owned building.
Email Ashland.news reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected].
March 7: Information added about police office in the West Concentrated Area Patrol area.
