Residents are hiring their own 'subscription' police to patrol neighborhoods.

Chris Manolis tired of paying a $75 fee every time his security system sounded a false alarm but he felt he had no choice.

The police weren't patrolling his block as much as they used to and Manolis needed to protect his historic Herron-Morton home of 44 years.

"They used to come down the alleys," the 86-year-old retiree said. "They didn't do that much anymore."

So Manolis found a third way; he got rid of the alarm and began paying $150 annual dues for security patrols by a company owned and staffed by Indianapolis Metropolitan police officers.

In joining the King Park Public Safety Cooperative, Manolis was putting his money toward a pumped-up version of the lone moonlighting cop who sits in a car at an apartment complex.

The dozen off-duty officers for Safe Neighborhoods make arrests, respond to 911 calls, question loiterers and chase trouble-makers. They drive their take-home patrol cars, wear their blue uniforms, carry their department issued guns and keep in touch with their on-duty counterparts through their police radios.

But some City-County councilors say the officers are using public resources for private profit and vowed to push for a change in off-duty employment rules. They contend a freelancing, off-duty force trawling the same city streets as IMPD could cause confusion and is costing the city money.

The company claims it is simply filling a demand to compensate for a shortage of officers in IMPD. It has violated no off-duty employment rules and, in fact, is permitted by IMPD.

Residents pay annual dues to purchase patrol hours. The more people who pay in, the more hours they can buy. For now, that amounts to 2 ½ hours a day. Those who don't pay still benefit because the officers go by their houses, too.

The dues paying residents, for their part, are thrilled to have the police "enhancement," which they say deters crime. Manolis calls it a "good investment."

At the same time, they fretted whether private cops on public streets were the wave of the future as cities struggle with shrinking revenues in a depressed economy.

Security guards and off-duty cops patrolling subdivisions, apartment complexes and businesses is nothing new but police professionals said it's rare for a large swath of inner-city residents to hire their own "subscription" police.

"I don't think I've seen anything quite like that on such a broad scale,'' said W. Craig Hartley, Jr., an 18-year police officer who is deputy director of the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies in Virginia. "In most cases you are talking about an individual cop working a specific property."

"They shouldn't be using our equipment when they have their own business," said Councilman Joe Simpson, a Democratic member of the public safety and criminal justice committee whose district includes King Park. "You should get your own uniforms, your own cars and your own badges. This is a demonstration of how wild it's gotten out there."

Simpson said he didn't even know there were private patrols in his district, though Safe Neighborhoods has been operating for two years and has a website in which its link to IMPD is a major selling point.

"Our officers are an elite group of highly trained professionals who are committed to making Indianapolis an exemplary model for public safety," safeindy.com boasts. "All officers are full time employees of IMPD."

Neither Mayor Greg Ballard's office nor IMPD Office of Professional Standards Chief Ellen Corcella would comment on Safe Neighborhoods or if the city plans tighter oversight of the off-duty process.

Private patrols could become tempting to lawmakers looking for fiscal relief in a bad economy, said Dennis Rosenbaum, professor of criminology, law and justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
"Law enforcement is at risk of surrendering some functions to private companies if they don't demonstrate that they are efficient and valuable," Rosenbaum said.

There already is a trend toward privatizing government services -- such as the Indiana tollway and Indianapolis parking meters -- and private cops in the United States outnumber public police, Rosenbaum said.

"It's possible we could start seeing certain police functions being outsourced," Rosenbaum said. "Writing tickets and other things that don't involve actual arrests."
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