“Prior to the merge, the 5th Precinct, the station house itself, was not big enough to process the amount of arrests that they had there on any given day,” Carver said. “You’ve now taken that workload … you’ve now transferred it down to the 4th Precinct. You have two computers to process arrests [since the merger]; at the 5th, I think you had four computers. Now what you’ve done is you’ve taken half the amount of work stations that you have to process an arrest. It can’t work, and the numbers show it can’t work.”

Carver also said that because the “violent crimes — the crimes that matter most” had increased, there was a need to re-evaluate the decision to merge, and that any NCPD staff members that saw the moves as a success should be replaced. “There’s nothing wrong with going back to the drawing board and saying, ‘Maybe we didn’t do this the right way,’” he said.

Police Commissioner Thomas Dale said in a statement that major crimes are down .29 percent countywide since last year, and that the number of police cars that patrolled the county before the mergers was the same as the number that are patrolling now. Dale also reported that total crime in the county is down 8 percent since last year.

While saying that the mergers were to blame for an increase in some crime categories, Carver did not offer an explanation for why there was not an increase in all major crimes or in total crime.

The dissolution of the 5th Precinct was opposed by many of the communities it included. A Facebook group named “Save the 5th Precinct” was started in January 2012 in an attempt to petition against the merger.