Chief shares challenges facing YPD

Lekan: Staffing remains ‘critical’

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories covering the Yuma City Council retreat held Feb. 11-12.

Although officers will see a hike in their paychecks in the new fiscal year starting July 1, it will take a couple of years for the Yuma Police Department to become stable. The reason is staffing, which remains “critical,” according to Police Chief John Lekan.

Lekan addressed the challenges facing the police department during a City Council retreat on Tuesday.

Calls for service in 2018 went down, but not necessarily because of less crime. The decrease is due to a “lack of proactive ability.” In other words, staffing is so low that the department is only responding to phone calls for service and officers are no longer “seekers of crime,” Lekan said.

With non-emergency calls, people have to wait for an officer to become available, sometimes up to two hours. For certain lowpriority calls, dispatchers will tell callers that an officer will not be responding. There are also less traffic stops, which means citations are also down.

Officially the department has 169 sworn officers and five vacancies. However, those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Three officers are attending the academy, two are in pre-academy status, four are in field training, three are on light or no-duty due injuries and four have been deployed by the military. That means the department has 153 officers who can actually serve on solo beats.

Pre-academy status refers to a recruit who has been hired and has begun training, such as learning to write reports, before attending the academy. If the

department waits to hire, some recruits find jobs somewhere else, Lekan said.

The department also has shortages in civilian staffing. It is authorized to fund 102 personnel, but it has five vacancies. Dispatching has two openings. Lekan noted that dispatchers are hard to recruit and hard to retain.

One public safety technician is on military leave; the other openings are for the positions of administrative assistant and community manager.

In 2018, YPD responded to 109,266 calls for service, down from 112,724 calls in 2007. The department generated 12,678 reports, down from 13,638 in 2017. The department is still responding to all accidents, which numbered 3,161 in 2018.

Lekan fears that the staffing challenges will force the department to cut some of its community engagement efforts, such as Neighborhood Watch, Honor Guard, Explorers and safety briefings to schools, clubs and businesses.

These community engagement efforts establish trust, legitimacy and transparency, Lekan said. “If we lose these, we lose that bond with the community. Then we’ll start seeing complaints like in other cities.”

These programs would be the first to go, since YPD’s first priority is to respond to calls for service. “We’re still holding on,” Lekan said.

Nevertheless, the department still had successes in 2018, including expansion of the public safety technician program, which allows civilians to pick up some of the duties formerly under the purview of sworn officers, who then are free to do policing work.

The department also reclassified a sworn lieutenant position to a civilian communications manager position. In addition, it has a civilian hiring and recruitment supervisor as well as a dedicated sworn recruitment officer.

The chief listed several grants, including $115,500 for body-worn cameras, and the replacement of 16 police vehicles among the accomplishments.

Unfortunately, Lekan noted, the naloxone program is growing. The department is training all officers in the use of the medication that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose. Yuma is now the “hot spot” for opioid use, Lekan added.

While crime in Yuma has been trending downward, according to the FBI national incident reporting system, the category of “crimes against society” has gone up due to drug offenses.

Lekan listed the opioid issue among the department’s critical challenges, which he said is putting stress and strain on the department, especially as it enters into the public school systems.

Another challenge is the inexperienced force. “We’re still a young, young police department,” Lekan said. However, hiring officers is a difficult process with only 11 out of 1,007 applicants passing the testing.

Other challenges include keeping up with current technology, such as body cameras and citizen online reporting, which the department will soon introduce. The list also contains expanding responsibilities related to homelessness, mental health, immigration, terrorism, disaster preparedness, emergency management and infrastructure security.

Retention is one challenge that might be alleviated by the recently adopted pay plan. In the meantime, officer turnover continues to be an issue, with 14 lost in 2018 and three already lost in 2019. In addition, six officers will retire in the next three months.

In conclusion, Lekan listed the following funding priorities for the new fiscal year: implementation of the step pay plan and market labor study, staffing stabilization, core competency training, body worn cameras program and fleet replacement.