The D.C. police department didn’t hand out Christmas bonuses last year, but the highest ranks didn’t necessarily feel the pinch.

Sixty-three members of the department’s command staff took home more than $100,000 in 2007. That list includes several members demoted in the fall by new Chief Cathy Lanier when she decided to take a crack at trimming the bureaucratic fat.

Assistant chiefs Alton Bigelow, Willie Dandridge, and Brian Jordan were demoted to commanders in September but still earned $152,727, $165,482, and $173,757, respectively. Two commanders—Robin Hoey, who was demoted to captain in April after clashing with the chief, and Hilton Burton, who was reassigned and placed under investigation this fall for allegedly sending sexually inappropriate e-mails—took home $115,636 and $140,629, respectively.

Their salaries are unlikely to suffer and definitely won’t dip below $100,000, to the dismay of Fraternal Order of Police president Kristopher Baumann, who represents rank-and-file cops. Baumann says he’s tried to find out what the brass are doing in their current high-paying positions. He hasn’t gotten an answer from the chief’s office. “They’re just off the grid,” Baumann says.

A department spokesperson provided a list of the reassignments, which range from the patrol division to the office of special projects.

Baumann doesn’t place all the blame on Lanier, noting that she inherited an inflated command staff from former chief Charles H. Ramsey. He says the benefits of keeping the highest ranks fat and happy are obvious. “It diffuses a lot of the responsibility,” he says, “and it puts a lot of people out there who are loyal to you.”

For those of you who don’t follow the comings and goings of top officials at D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), be aware that former Chief Charles H. Ramsey is on the verge of taking over Philadelphia’s cop shop. That means it’s time for papers in Philly to review Ramsey’s tenure in the District.

Along comes a familiar face. Jonathan York did some cops reporting here at City Paper before moving to Philadelphia. In this week’s edition of the Philadelphia Weekly, York puts his new fellow citizens on alert via a featurey remembrance of Ramsey. The piece is titled “The Out-of-Towners” and carries this subhed: “Ramsey’s record worries this former D.C. reporter.”

Then York, who did plenty of fine work for this publication, slips into a mess of policing cliches and recycled petty gripes from rank-and-file cops. Here’s a sampling:

York Claim: “when Ramsey was in charge…he seemed to have one way of doing things. If there was a high-profile appearance (Bush speeches), a high-profile disappearance (Chandra Levy) or any action at all in well-developed parts of Northwest Washington, he brought a flood of blue and white.

But if there was a stabbing, a shooting or a beating in the neighborhoods—which there was almost every night—he hardly changed a thing.”

Reality: True that Ramsey was a PR genius. But the notion that he somehow didn’t care what happened in the “neighborhoods” is a strange, coded swipe that doesn’t hold up.

York Claim: “I once watched two officers run down a crack dealer who was driving a car with hot tags. As they stood on a curb near some open-air drug sales, they complained that nobody knows what they deal with every day. They had too much crime and not enough help. ”

Reality: No. 1: So the cops stopped doing their job to gripe to you, Yorkie? They must have been good officers! No. 2: Yes, we know you were out there on the streets, man!

York Claim: “On the southeast side of Capitol Hill, where I lived, you could walk around the corner and see the Library of Congress 12 blocks away. The neighbors all worked for government, nonprofits or the media. But there were housing projects across the street, which meant that drug deals, muggings and gunshots disturbed our quiet block.”

Reality: Crime alongside federal icons! Novel concept there.

York Claim: “But I was surprised that some of the veterans had unreserved dislike for Ramsey, whom they believed was putting forces downtown at the expense of the neighborhoods.”

Reality: Officers are dumping on their chief. Fire up the headline.

York Claim: “Most people I knew in D.C. had been mugged, intimidated or followed.”

Reality: Followed? Just how exactly does that work?

C’mon York–you can do better than this.

Via this week’s Dupont Current comes a nice scoop: The police cameras installed across the city under the reign of police Chief Charles H. Ramsey may well be worthless. The Current discusses a pair of incidents around Adams Morgan that occurred within range of such cameras, yet they yielded no useful clues/evidence for the crimes. The incidents in question include an April break-in at Asylum on 18th Street and a shooting at 17th and Euclid streets in February.

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham tells the Current: “I think we have to approach this with limited expectations about what the cameras can achieve.”

Right on. The cameras are a colossal waste of time and money, and a distraction from the difficult job of fighting crime in the District. They came through on one front that was terribly important to Ramsey: public relations.

During his eight-year tenure at the helm of the D.C. police force, Charles H. Ramsey made a big deal of stopping pointless car chases in pursuit of fleeing perps. They’re too dangerous, said the top cop. Ironic, then, that the last lawsuit filed against Ramsey while he was sitting chief revolves around a chase that ended badly. On Dec. 22, Robert T. Lee and Alyce Summers filed a complaint in U.S. District Court alleging that police improperly pursued Lee’s daughter and Summers, who on Christmas Eve 2005 accepted a ride from a man who had stolen the car 30 minutes earlier in Hyattsville. Three separate law-enforcement agencies chased the car down Pennsylvania Avenue SE. At the 1700 block, the car slammed into a light pole, injuring Summers and killing Lee’s daughter. The department’s general orders stipulate that officers may pursue a fleeing suspect only if they’ve exhausted all other remedies, believe that the suspect is a danger, and “the lives of innocent people will not be endangered.”

D.C. cops are in for some changes come 2007. And they won’t just be answering to a new chief, Cathy Lanier. Many of the city’s officers will also be answering to new badge numbers, and they’re not all thrilled about it.

Back in the fall of 2005, now-outgoing Chief Charles H. Ramsey ordered that the department bring order and security to its badge-numbering system. Whereas badge numbers have traditionally been issued more or less at random, Ramsey wanted to see a system in which numbers ascended according to rank. In other words, under the new system, the chief wears Badge No. 1, and the rest follow, down through commanders and lieutenants and crossing guards.

“It’s a pyramid concept,” explains Edward Hamilton, who is director of support services and was charged with developing the new badge system. “One of the concerns [under the old system] was that badge numbering didn’t have any rhyme or reason.…Now, if I saw a badge and it had number 8601 on it, I automatically know that’s a crossing guard, because those start with 8600.”

The new badges are more difficult to forge, Hamilton says, and they come with serial tracking numbers on the back. In the past, if a badge turned up “you couldn’t tell who had lost that badge” because it wasn’t serialized, says Hamilton. “Even if you retire, that number is still alive. Without having [serial numbers], you can’t tell if it’s a knockoff or a legitimate badge or who had it.”

Ranked officials have been getting their badges replaced over the course of the past year. General officers just recently received instructions to head down to the department’s equipment-and-supplies office to get their new shields. Their old badges will be incinerated.

D.C. police union head Kristopher Baumann says he’s been fielding complaints from officers ever since news of the badge switcheroo hit the departmentwide teletype on Dec. 6. The gist of their gripe: We don’t need no stinkin’ new badges.

“We’re spending thousands of dollars of taxpayer money?to institute a new badge system where we didn’t need to,” says Baumann. “That money could be for more patrol cars or more police officers.” He adds, “Officers have a sentimental attachment to badge numbers. I thought for morale you’d want to instill pride and a sense of continuity in officers.”

A number of officers speaking on condition of anonymity tell City Desk that they find the change in systems to be pointless. Furthermore, some of their co-workers are peeved about losing badge numbers they’ve identified with for years.

“Not to sound corny, [but] it’s something that has history to it,” says one cop. “When you’re an officer you take great pride in the number. Maybe it was a family member’s badge.…Some of them have a lot of significance to them. Some guys have had badges for 23 years.” The same cop says some officers who received recycled badge numbers have gone so far as to research the officers who wore their numbers before them. “Maybe it was someone who retired or passed away, you might have gotten theirs.”

But there’s more than just a romantic attachment. Cops commonly engrave their badge numbers on jewelry for themselves and family, and some go a step further. “I’m sure there are officers with their badge numbers [on license plates],” says Baumann. “And I’m sure there are officers with tattoos.”

Hamilton says he and officials were fully aware of the “obvious emotional attachments” at play. So while the department can’t do much for officers whose body ink turns obsolete overnight, Hamilton says the badge company can partially accommodate the clingiest of the city’s officers. “If you had that badge number for 20 years and want to keep a symbol of it, you can order the badge as a replica,” he explains.

Such a commemorative shield, Hamilton says, will even come in Lucite.

Why do D.C. police cruisers have “running” flashing lights? Doesn’t that just give them away? And why are they white in the front and blue and red in the back?

A few years ago, D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey visited Israel. After he landed, one of the first things he noticed was that the Israeli police cruisers patrolled with running flashing lights to increase their visibility and make residents feel safer.

“In a place with car bombings and other terrorist attacks putting people in a near-constant state of fear, the police lights provided people a sense that the police presence was felt,” says Assistant Chief Brian Jordan.

So when Ramsey returned to the District he initiated a policy that encourages every marked police car to patrol with their flashing lights in order to make District residents feel safer, as well as to counter District residents’ gripes that “We never see the police,” says Jordan.

Exceptions to the policy do exist, including when making their presence known could jeopardize an arrest.

The policy did require some tweaking, Jordan says, since most newcomers to the District are unaccustomed to police patrolling with their lights on. That’s why the police removed the colored bars from the front of their lights.

“We needed to make sure people knew that a police car patrolling was not an emergency,” says Jordan, noting that at first, residents were often confused and pulled over whenever they saw a cruiser with its lights on.

Whether the policy actually makes a difference is debatable, says one officer who declined to be named. “If the chief wants it done, we’ve got to do it—he feels that it’s working,” he says.

Every Monday, the ‘Huh?’ Bub takes your questions. Got one?

With the recent spike in homicides, D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey declared the city under a crime emergency, a step that gives him extra authority to mess with officers’ schedules and flood high-crime areas. It’s one of those times when the chief might turn to his Reserve Corps, a unit of roughly 200 volunteer officers whose primary function is to provide police visibility. This spring, the volunteers contend, Ramsey weakened the reserve force by stripping volunteers’ policing authority and their ability to fight dismissals. The volunteers have since cut back on volunteering, a development that hit hard on July 4, when the department fielded only a fraction of its reserve phalanx. One volunteer who refused to work on Independence Day wrote his superior via e-mail on July 3: “With my own well-being and liability in mind, I cannot work under the conditions laid out in the new [rules].” Two weeks ago, reserve officer Matthew August LeFande and other volunteers filed a class-action lawsuit in District Court seeking monetary damages and a halt to the new rules. “I liken it to kicking a puppy; there’s no point to it,” LeFande says of the new regs. “You want to belittle these people. All they want to do is show up and do police work.” Says Ramsey: “They’re volunteers. Don’t you think I have the right to [manage] how you are volunteering?”