Quality of life issues.

I think the city needs to focus more on quality of life issues in the city such as graffiti, illegal dumping, trashed properties, littering, & run-down properties. All of these issues affect us in many ways. Property values decline, discourages business development, negative appearance, lowers pride, and are both safety & health concerns.

Right now the city has a sweep department within recycling that deals with the issues mentioned however they only have three sweep officers that cover three districts in the city. The city says the sweep officers are proactively and on a complaint basis addressing the quality of life issues mentioned. According to the city their normal response time to a complaint is within a 24 hour period. According to the city 6000 tickets were issued covering 8000 violations last year. However the mayor gave a different number when asked. According to the mayor over 7500 sweep tickets were issued covering 13,455 violations. So why are the sweep department numbers different from the mayor's numbers? I will leave that answer up to you.
The police, health, animal control, and engineering also give out sweep tickets to residents.

In my opinion the sweep program is not effective enough and is not utilized correctly. There are residents in the city that have gotten sweep tickets for minor issues such as leaving a can of paint outside but there are properties in the city that have piles and piles of trash & debris. I don't understand how the sweep officers are not noticing glaring violations but can notice a can of paint on a sidewalk.

My opinion is the sweep department needs to be scraped and a quality of life unit within the police department needs to be created. The quality of life unit would be supervised by an Allentown police officer with a rank of sergeant or higher. The unit would have QOL officers that are civilian officers. The QOL unit would patrol the streets and proactively search for quality of life violations in progress and stop those activities from happening. They would also respond to complaints as well. If the QOL officers required any police assistance they could use radios to call in for assistance and would have direct communication with our communications center. The idea is to stop the activity while it's happening and not after it already happened.

The civilian officers would go through training on how to keep on the look out for violations and how to address the violations. They would also go through self defense training in case they would get attacked while on the streets patrolling. Each section of the city would have at least one officer patrolling at all times keeping a look out for quality of life violations.

The city needs to show residents and property owners that we are not going to tolerate behaviors that lead to quality of life issues in the city and that we will take action. Right now people know they can trash the city and get away with it. The city doesn't enforce the ordinances we have in place strictly enough. To them the city is a joke. It is time to change that attitude towards the city.