The Columbus Division of Police is sharing details about its plan to re-organize where officers conduct patrols.
Right now, the division has five police zones, containing four precincts each.
But on April 30, the police department will divide the city into six zones, as recommended in a recent agency review by the Justice Department.
"We're constantly studying where crime is, where it's occurring within the city," said Special Projects Commander Mark Lang. "And we realized that we weren't always best aligned for where that crime was and when during the day it was happening."
Lang said the re-structuring will distribute workloads more evenly and allow officers to respond to calls more quickly. The new map also better aligns with neighborhood boundaries.
"As we talked to the community, we heard loud and clear that some of them said 'Hey, the boundary between zones goes right down the middle of our neighborhood. We want to see the same officers here all the time.' And so that was one of the changes that we were able to make," Lang said.
Lang said the last time the division underwent a similar re-structuring was in 2010. The new map enables the division to add more precincts in the future as the city's population grows, according to Lang.
"What we don't want to get into is another situation where we're waiting a decade, with officers getting more and more overburdened," he said.
Zone 6 will now consist of:
- Precinct 2 which is currently on Zone 4 and covers north of E. Hudson Street and south of E. Cooke Road
- Precinct 5 which is currently on Zone 4 and covers south of E. Hudson Street and north of E. 5th Avenue
- Precinct 7 which is currently on Zone 5 which covers west of 270 E, north of E. Broad Street and south of E. 5th Avenue
See the full patrol zone re-structuring map below:
