Palmer short on officers

PALMER -- The Palmer Police Department has been understaffed for about 10 months and the situation prompted city council member Diana Long to call for a report from the city administration about police staffing at the next city council meeting July 23.

Long called the situation "critical" at the July 9 council meeting. She said officers are overworked, and she wants to know when something will be done about it.

"I want to know when these positions are going to be filled. I want a time line. I want to know when these guys are going to be able to have two days off in a row," Long said.

Long said officers were being scheduled for 12 hour shifts and warned that even longer hours would be expected during the Alaska State Fair in August. She said that police officers' judgment could be impaired when they are overworked. She also claimed that officer James Rowland was on a similar schedule when he was killed in May 1999.

Rowland was killed by Kim Cook of Slana. Rowland was working the graveyard shift without a partner and responded to a routine call to check on a man slumped over the steering wheel of a truck in the Palmer Carrs parking lot. The man in the truck turned out to be Cook. During Cook's trial, prosecutors argued Cook was prone to violence and hated police officers. Cook had previous run-ins with other police departments in the years before Rowland was killed, prosecutors said.

"Officer Rowland was working 12 hour shifts with no days off when he was killed. Do we need to lose another officer?" asked Long.

Palmer police chief George R. "Russ" Boatright confirmed most of what Long talked about in the meeting. Palmer PD is advertising for two positions, and the department is currently being run with nine officers, according to Boatright. The department also has a vacant sergeant position, which Boatright expects to fill by promotion from within.

Boatright is also new to the chief's desk; he was hired last fall after twice serving as interim chief. He admits to having a "learning curve" in front of him, but said in the same breath that he's facing it head-on .

"I've picked up a good deal of knowledge about how to make this happen in a more expedient way, and it's gonna happen in a more expedient way," he said.

One new patrol officer starts today, according to Boatright, but Sergeant Charlie Crim retired last month, so in terms of people in uniform the department is at the same staffing level as last month. Crim's departure also puts more supervisory duties on Boatright and Sergeant Thomas Remaley, which Boatright said compounds the staffing problem because it leaves less time for the chief to focus on the hiring process.

When fully staffed, Palmer PD employs nine patrol officers and two sergeants. But one officer is on permanent assignment to the Mat-Su Drug Team, an inter-departmental unit that is supervised by the Alaska State Troopers and funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. That leaves eight officers to cover a town where the population grew from 2,866 to 4,385 in the last decade, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

Boatright said he also reworked the advertisement for a new officer with help from city hall, which should speed up the process. Palmer PD's newest officer is Peter Steen. According to Boatright, Steen was hired from a pool of applicants that started with about 17 people, but some of the applicants didn't qualify because of a strict interpretation pertaining to certification by the Alaska Police Standards Council (APSC). Boatright said that Palmer needs to take advantage of the APSC reciprocity policy and specifically say so in its job listings. That way some out-of-state candidates will get a better look next time around.

"We've had to make changes in the way we posted [the job opening]," he said.

The changes are being made with help from city manager Tom Healy and can be made without changes to city code or changes in the police department's policies.

Of the Palmer council's seven members, Long might be the most likely watchdog and supporter of the police department. Long currently works as a manager for the State of Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in Palmer, but her government service career started with a job as a dispatcher for Palmer PD in the 1970s. When Long started at DMV in 1984, DMV was a division of the department of public safety and the Valley DMV counter was inside the Palmer public safety building. DMV has since moved from that building and out from under public safety to the Department of Administration, but Long is still in touch with the people who work at the Palmer police station.

"This is stuff I just sort of picked up on in conversations and then asked questions about, Long said. "[The officers] probably feel more comfortable talking to me because I have previous law enforcement experience."

Long said that, on the whole, Palmer council members react to public input and that she didn't think the other council members would have necessarily heard from police officers.

"I don't ever want to see us lose another officer like we lost Officer Rowland," Long said Monday, "I had known him since childhood, and I don't want to see anything like that happen to another officer again."