Commission approves new hiring processes for police

FORT SMITH — The Civil Service Commission waived some testing requirements to allow a sworn reserve officer to return full time to the Police Department.

Police Chief Danny Baker said the department recently closed applications for its current hiring cycle and continues to have a number of vacancies. He said its a challenge departments are facing across the nation.

Baker said an off icer that left the department last September wants to return, and the commission’s action waives the written and physical test portions of the hiring process for him.

“I believe he was with us for about a year, a little bit over a year,” Baker said. “He was a fully trained, full-time police officer. He was in good standing at the Police Department and left for a job in the private sector.

“We’re not bringing somebody back who was a problem. I don’t believe he had any disciplinary issues whatsoever. I’ve not asked about why he’s wanting to come back. To be honest with you, when we have a good officer like this particular individual that wants to come back and be a part of the department, I’m willing to step up and do what I can to help facilitate that.”

Baker said the man is still employed elsewhere.

“He’s actually working the street now for us as a reserve officer, occasionally. So he is in full, legal good standing with returning to work and being a police officer immediately, with no additional need to train or anything else, because he has been a police officer since his first test with the civil service,” the department’s training coordinator, James Hays, noted.

Baker asked some regulations not be waived, which includes having the officer submit to a drug test and serving a 12-month probationary period before completing his appointment.

The city’s human resources coordinator, Lindsey Kaelin, also asked the commission to approve an emergency staffing process allowing certified officers to be hired without additional training.

Baker said a majority of new officers hired are not certified, but the department receives periodic interest from certified officers.

“I will say we have significantly increased our recruiting efforts in other parts of the country, targeting specific areas that we know are losing police officers, trying to get our name out there on a national level. So I have long expected us to begin seeing an increase in the number of certified individuals interested in Fort Smith,” he said.

Hays said the emergency hiring process would allow the department to hire those officers by the end of the year, as opposed to the regular hiring process, which would have them hired by the beginning of 2022.

The commission unanimously approved the process.

Commission Chairman Cole Goodman asked Baker to start working on a process allowing the department to hire year-round, as opposed to periodically.

“I know that we have lost some potential applicants because we were not in a hiring cycle at the time that they were interested in coming to us, so they moved on to someone else,” Baker said. “We really need the ability, when we have a viable recruit that wants to be considered for employment with us, I think that we need to have a process in place where we can bring them in, do an examination, get through all of the prerequisite testing and either offer them conditional employment or give them employment, and find something for them to do until we can get them into a police academy.”