SOUTH BEND — City annexation records show the size of South Bend has increased by 24% over the past 30 years. Some city leaders say many of those "new" areas aren't being patrolled by police officers on a regular basis.

Most police officers are assigned to patrol a "beat" area during their shift, though they do respond to outside calls as well. A number of newly annexed areas, particularly on the northwest and southeast sides of the city, aren't covered by a specific beat.

Bruce Foss lives in one of them, in a new neighborhood just a few hundred feet south of the Michigan state line.

His address reads "South Bend," but when asked if he sees South Bend officers patrolling his neighborhood on a regular basis, he replied "very, very rarely, if at all."

Common Council member and South Bend Police Corporal Derek Dieter says a map showing the city's annexations over the last 30 years shows why.

"The city boundaries now go up to the state of Michigan," he said. "The beat that starts to cover that starts at Angela and Riverside. [The boundaries] go down past Kern Road [to the South]. But the beats have stayed the same. We've not revamped the beat structure since I started in 1978."

Dieter says that means officers only "regularly" patrol 76% of the city, areas annexed into South Bend before 1978.

Click on the "Watch The Video" link above to see the annexation map.

Dieter also says when officers do respond to calls in newly annexed areas, the trip from their "regular" beat can take up to eight minutes.

"For example, it there's a call up near the state line, that car is usually in the northwest area of Lincolnway. That's a long way for cars to go when they're traveling up to those sides of town," he said.

It's not just homes. A number of businesses in the Cleveland Road corridor are included in the new annexation area.

"There are restaurants, businesses, banks, and so on," said Dieter. "There was a robbery at a Portage Avenue bank up in that quadrant. The car that has that beat coverage is just huge."

Responding to those calls also takes officers away from their regular beats. In some cases, those areas have much higher crime rates.

But police administrators say that doesn't happen very often, because the volume of calls to those annexed areas is "extremely low." They say putting officers there on a full time basis would be a waste of resources.

"In the far northwest section, call volume is practically nil," said South Bend Police Captain Phil Trent. "Call density in [the western and near northwestern sections] is absolutely enormous. So, it's not so much the idea of the guy coming up there to service a call as it is the guy coming down to the inner city to service a call and leaving that beat anyway. You've got practically zero calls there, but you're still paying a full time employee to bump around up there for virtually no reason."

Capt. Trent also says adding just one beat means adding more than just one new officer.

"It takes approximately 2.8 officers to man a beat for a shift," said Trent. "So, you're talking about 8-9 new officers you need for every beat, for every shift, between the officer to cover the beat, officers to cover that officer's days off, and officers to cover sick time and vacation days."

City leaders have already projected the loss of 40 police officers over the next two years due to budget constraints, and Trent says the money the department does have is better spent adding additional patrols to higher crime areas.

Even so, Trent says beats have been studied, and updated within the last eight years. He also says the department has found a better approach by constantly updating patrols, rather than switching entire beats.

"Chief Boykins did that today, in fact, in response to upsurges in activity," he said on Wednesday. "That's usually done within 24-48 hours, sometimes even the same day. That actually works better, and it's more economical. It's a win-win for taxpayers, because it doesn't make sense to place officers in beats comprised mostly of empty real estate."

But those who do live in the newly annexed areas say the map deserves a closer look.

"Everybody's always looking for a quick response when they have a problem. So, if we're part of South Bend, we should have coverage up here like everybody else," said Foss.

"If someone has just built a new home, they deserve at some point, a squad car to be driving through their neighborhood," agreed Dieter. "There's no question in my mind that we need to add beats on the far north side of town and the far south side of town. The people that live and work up there need to have police officers patrolling that area."