If you feel like you’ve seen more bike cops on Capitol Hill this summer, you have, according to East Precinct commander Capt. Jim Dermody. But Dermody tells CHS that the East Precinct Mountain Bike Squad isn’t pumped up because of short-term crime trends or increased hiring. Dermody says the night time bike patrols are a seasonal summer thing — “We don’t want to put them out there when it’s wet and cold.” — but that the increased daytime presence is unusual and a sign of the growing importance of the bike squad.

Photo: cdine uploaded to flickr

“[The squad] covers a lot of the area you’d like to cover,” Dermody said. He said one of the biggest values is simply visibility of his police force on the streets but he also added that the bike cops excel in areas of community outreach and what Dermody called ‘problem solving’ — basically, the ability to better react to situations encountered in a dense, urban environment. Dermody said the bikers are also important for the increasing number of public events in the East Precinct — both what he called community events and “free speech” events, also known as protests.

According to the SPD, the first bike patrol in the city started in 1987 with two officers in part due to the construction of the Metro tunnel making downtown even more difficult to navigate in a police cruiser. More from the SPD:

To join the unit, every Officer must complete a week long training session where they receive specialized instruction. From riding up and down stairways to cone courses and emergency dismounts, officers who complete the session are capable of a vast array of maneuvers on a mountain bike.

Today there are day and night bike patrol squads proactively participating in undercover and on view narcotics enforcement, crowd control and continually responding to 9-1-1 calls. While the West Precinct (downtown) carries the largest squad, every precinct in the city utilizes bike patrols in providing police services to the city.

The East Precinct team providing security during Blue Angels performance (Photo: SPD)

Dermody said one example area where the bike patrols have been active in the East Precinct lately is 12th and Jackson. It’s an area with a lot of street narcotics activity. Dermody said the interactions between his officers and the people they are protecting and policing in the area are better when the area is patrolled by the bike squad.

But putting a cop on a bike when you have a tight City Hall budget means taking a cop out of a car. To sustain the six officers and one managing sergeant he would like to keep on patrol in the East Precinct, Dermody said he has shifted his available officers to keep the daytime patrols rolling for the time being. And there are other demands. Dermody said each precinct must give up a bike officer for downtown duty on weekends. When the new Seattle budget is announced later in September, the process will begin to figure out if the East Precinct Mountain Bike Squad can become a full-time resource on Capitol Hill. Given what Dermody has seen so far from his squad, even if SPD’s hiring is curtailed by the new budget, it might be time to park a cruiser or two.