Stretched too thin: Jackson Police Department

Thursday, January 18, 2007

By Jake Nichols

Jackson Police Department, Teton County Sheriff's Office face serious shortages of uniformed officers
    It’s 9:23 p.m. on a cold, quiet Tuesday night in mid-January. A wanted California felon pulls into the Maverik with bad intentions. Across town, near the Log Cabin Saloon, a Jackson police officer has requested backup assistance for a routine DUI stop. The driver has become belligerent.
    A sheriff’s deputy is dispatched at 9:31 p.m. to see about a burglar alarm that has been going off for over an hour at a posh Wilson address. It’s the third time this month the touchy ADT system has gone off … all false alarms.
At 9:39 p.m., a passerby hears a scream inside the Maverik. The simple holdup has gone horribly wrong and a cashier lies bleeding on the floor. Dispatch receives the frantic 911 call but have no available units. None.
    The above scenario is fictional but the reality is the Jackson Police Department (JPD) and the Teton County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO) are facing manpower shortages that are already forcing them to prioritize calls for service.
    “As much as we’ve tried, we are unable to get people to make reservations for calls for service,” jokes Jackson Police Department Sergeant Scott Terry. “So if we only have one officer working and the calls come in stacked up, we will have to prioritize calls. If we have only one guy available to go, or two, and they are both tied up with a drunk driver, well, you have a situation.”
    The problem is two-fold: First, no one, it seems, wants to be a cop. Retiring baby boomers, low pay, and lack of appeal have reduced the new recruit market to measly numbers. Add to that Jackson Hole’s nosebleed cost of living and JPD is scratching their heads trying to solve the case of the disappearing officers.
    “It’s not just here,” JPD Chief Dan Zivkovich says of the growing national trend. “You look at fewer people interested in police work shrinking the job pool, and birth rates are down, and there are fewer people with the skills needed to be officers.”
    Urban centers like Phoenix, Albuquerque and Las Vegas are also experiencing police shortages. Headlines from as far away as Sydney, Australia, read, “Police shortages have reached crisis point.” Life-threatening calls in Houston, once responded to in less than five minutes, now take an average of 10.3 minutes. “It’s real scary,” one resident told Houston’s Local 2 News. “A whole lot can go wrong in 10 minutes.”
If other municipalities can’t find cops, what are Jackson’s chances of finding the officer who is a cut above?
    “This is Jackson,” Zivkovich says. “We tend to have a higher threshold for bringing people on board.”
    Zivkovich and his department practice what is called “community-oriented policing.”
“A lot of agencies respond to calls and make arrests,” says Terry. “That seems to be their focus. Whereas here our goal is to resolve the situation. Maybe that means an arrest. Maybe it means getting this person into counseling. It may involve getting him into a motel for a night. It may involve calling somebody or networking or calling in another agency or organization. The idea is, what’s going to be best for everyone involved here?
    “To do this kind of policing and trust people with that kind of authority and decision-making, you have to look for traits that are above and beyond what’s required just to do routine police work,” Terry continues. “We train our officers as field investigators, not just report-takers who document a crime occurred. They investigate things in the field and take it absolutely as far as they can – gathering evidence and interviewing people – that other departments just blow off.”
    The concept is not groundbreaking, but full implementation is rare. “A lot of agencies engage in what they call community-oriented policing, but the element they leave out is the buy-in from the officers,” Zivkovich says. “Some agencies are not willing to trust their officers in making these kinds of decisions – to empower them to be autonomous0. They’re old school supervisors that just don’t trust their employees.”
Ideally, officers who can think on their feet help prevent overcrowded holding tanks and already burdened court dockets. A little CSI on JH streets also reduces investigator follow up.
    “That is one of the biggest impacts of being shorthanded,” Zivkovich says. “You’d like to do these extensive things in the field with officers who are empowered to do that, but when you have six shifts that aren’t being covered, these officers don’t have time and there is an awful lot of follow up that’s left to be prioritized.”
    Terry agreed. “When you are shorthanded on officers you can’t do this field investigation. Then it relies on the investigation units to do the investigation, but when you’ve robbed that unit of people just to put them into the field, you can’t do the investigation. It’s a catch-22 … and we’re hurting.”
    The Jackson Police Department has only two investigators and 21 officers, leaving many shifts filled by only two or sometimes one unit on the road. Zivkovich has been proactive about the shortage, working closely with Sheriff Bob Zimmer to make sure he short-shifts his crews when TCSO is fully covered and vice-versa. Still, the vacancy left by Sgt. Todd Smith to serve as Lincoln County Sheriff has put a crunch on law enforcement resources.
    “When Todd Smith got elected, he took one of ours and three of the city’s officers,” Sheriff Bob Zimmer says. “It kind of put both organizations in a precarious situation.”
“And we’re not done yet,” Terry says. “Todd’s new budget takes effect in July, and I understand he’s already been authorized for three additional positions. There is another chance to lose more officers to Lincoln County because the cost of living is cheaper down there.”
    The lure of cheaper housing has taken a bite out of the local labor pool. Already, 65 percent of Teton County sheriff deputies live outside the county they police. Zivkovich says that’s not far off for his department, either.
    “We’ve always tried to make sure our police officers were a part of the community, not apart from the community,” Terry says. “It was so much easier in years past to do this because our members lived within our jurisdiction. They not only lived here, but they were members of Rotary, they were coaching Boy Scouts, they were involved in PTA – all these different things. Now, with the cost of living, the vast majority live in Idaho or out of the county, and they are not active in our community. They are not having that conversation in the grocery store line with the people they protect, and we’re losing a lot because of that.”
    “I heard one of the highway patrol troopers call in an abandoned vehicle in one of the parking areas down south,” Zivkovich recalls, “and I recognized the name. It was somebody from Jackson. I figured they were probably out taking photographs. It wasn’t an abandoned vehicle. That’s what you lose when you have your officers living in Alpine and in Teton County, Idaho. Most of the names they are familiar with are the ones they interact with on a daily basis, which are not your pillars of the community, and so that trooper had no clue what that name meant. Because the trooper doesn’t live here, he probably put a big green sticker on the window for tow when in fact it probably wasn’t going to be there in a few hours.”
    Attracting officers has been difficult. Glossy magazine ads in Arizona and Texas haven’t lured a single response, despite advertising a $300 a month stipend for fluent Spanish-speakers – something the department now lacks with the departure of Trevor Aitken to Star Valley.
    “We have two officers that are conversant in Spanish and several that have pretty good Spanish skills. And most can gather basic information,” Zivkovich says. “Where we’re hurting is the follow-up stuff, because that’s when you need to be able to be fluent. You have to hear what was said, how it was said, and the words that were chosen, and that’s just dealing with the suspects, not to mention victims.”
    The department must rely on translators supplied by the county, city or Latino Resource Center. That can get expensive. A new ATT language line has just been installed at dispatch for over $800. It will allow calls to be translated on the fly from some 50 languages. Jailers are already using it to talk to inmates.
    “I’ve run classified ads in the paper,” Zimmer says. “I think we advertised in the International Association of Chiefs of Police magazine, and I don’t think we got one response. All these things are not cheap. I’ve appealed, verbally, to the community: ‘Come work in the detention facility.’ It’s not a bad wage, pretty good benefits – and there is no interest. I can’t even get them to come in and apply.”
    “We need help,” Zivkovich agrees. “We can’t find anybody who’s bilingual who will apply. So far we’ve gotten no leads from magazine ads. We’re kind of at wit’s end to attract people to apply.”
    “We have been trying to be more proactive about this by sending all of our officers to Spanish immersion school,” Terry adds. “So at least they have some basic knowledge and are somewhat conversant out on the street.”
    Bilingual stipends, housing stipends, signing bonuses, beefed-up health care and a take-home car program are all being discussed or implemented to attract and retain officers. Law enforcement budgets are straining already with overtime pay. Mayor Mark Barron has vowed to help anyway the Town can.
    “We’ve seen this coming,” Barron says. “The first six months are going to be a challenge. Fortunately it’s the slowest six months of the year. There are all kinds of policies to look at. We are looking at officers in the valley or even out of the valley being able to take their cars home, some kind of housing stipend. We made a significant payroll adjustment in our last budget to try to help. But we have to recognize the cost of living in this town and county far outpaces the local government’s ability to increase salaries. Those bills come in every month.”
    Zivkovich says, “Whatever we decide to do we have to be able to pay for it. I would be a little reluctant to [offer a sign-on bonus], because then you’ve got people coming here just because of the signing bonus and not because they want to come here. To me, you need to have something more job-related than that, whether it’s a housing stipend or it’s the take-home car program. Something that is not a one-time thing where someone is applying just to get that.”
    While the answers remain elusive, the evidence is concrete and pointing toward real trouble this summer. Already Community Service Officers are helping out with evidence technician work while investigators pull shifts driving patrol cars.
    “Every division in this department is taking a hit,” Terry says. The department has plans to contract out for law enforcement help this coming Hill Climb, according to Zivkovich.
    “Our resources are stretched really, really thin … and this is winter time,” the chief says. “The reality is, if this was summer, we would really be swamped because there are so many calls for service. As proactive as we try to be, we are almost totally reactive in the summer because of the number of calls that come in.”

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