Many officers have been unhappy lately with the departments’ slow, knee jerk reaction to the staffing crisis which is crippling police services at all four campuses.
The first solution was to ignore all the unhappy officers who were getting burnt out from the lack of officer staffing at ASUPD. Next, the solution to fixing the staffing problem was to try and hire every individual with a pulse who was referred by a current ASU employee. After these two plans failed miserably, ASUPD decided to now recall the support services officers to fill the gaps in the schedule. WHAT!
Instead of having your extraneous “specialty” assignments help out patrol (K9, the two officers assigned to Tempe Bike Patrol, the detective assigned to work with TPD, the Sergeant’s over various desk positions), you have the few detectives you DO have respond to calls “when patrol gets backed up”. How is that effective? Another idea…how about Command staff start shagging calls and running traffic?
Support services doesn’t handle shit. The staff, students, and tax payers continue to pay premium prices for sub standard policing and their safety goes right out the window. It’s not that we have bad officers, we don’t have enough and will not anytime soon, instead we have a lot of six figure salary holders with nothing but time on their hands. Our 1 to 1 officer to supervisor ratio, more mismanagement has been a disaster waiting to happen.
Command is adding the support service numbers to patrol numbers to say look, we got it covered. The sad thing is the chief was told by outside police auditors in the 2011 accreditation that the department would face a staffing problem. The chief reacted to the staffing issue in 2013, long after it turned to a crisis. The answer? Bump officer pay to what NAU and UofA officers were making for years. Did the chief retain all his perks, get pay raise after raise?
You bet he did, right off the charts beyond any chief in the state. Why? Because he’s that good…at… But let’s not just blame him, what were the home grown command staff saying the two years the problem snowballed? They probably bobbleheaded him into thinking everything was A OK. This is what happens when a place is half staffed with supervisors, plenty of whom are legends in their own minds and think employees are disposable.
I have never seen a group of people in charge of something with so little knowledge of how to run it. Less damage would be done if certain people stayed the fuck home or came to work and kept their mouths shut.
Delegate everything to the remaining sergeants who haven’t sold their souls and have people skills intact. Our crime prevention and events officers aren’t doing shit, give them a patrol mandate. Detectives just might have work to do to keep the university from getting sued…again.
Has anyone asked where the millions upon millions of dollars in the budget have been spent for a department that can’t patrol it’s own campuses.
Somebody should drop a line to the people in charge of downtown and let them know that no police officers, only police aides, are manning that campus.
I found the articles about the chief’s former university chief positions interesting, looks like history is repeating itself. Oh well, not going to be my problem, have fun with that.
With the rate of attrition and people rapid fire dropping applications everywhere there won’t be support services.
Support services can’t handle the numbers of officers leaving and still do their jobs, it’s not a reasonable expectation.