Survey says Palmer residents are A-OK with police department

PALMER — The verdict is in: Palmerites like their police force.

That’s the message Police Chief George R. Boatright said the department received from 62 petitions the department brought to area residents last year. By and large, respondents said they were pleased with police service.

But that’s not to say everyone was pleased.

One respondent asks that police “not be so ‘stupid’ about traffic enforcement.”

Another says certain officers “think they have a God complex.”

But a quick calculation shows the average score for a question that asked residents to rank officers’ professionalism on a scale of 1 to 5 was 4.84. Thirteen surveys had no answer to the question. A question that asked them to similarly rank satisfaction with police service yielded a score of 4.68. One respondent did not answer.

Officers personally brought the surveys to local homes from May to October last year, Boatright said. Officers chose homes at random then interviewed residents and recorded their responses. Names weren’t taken, but addresses were to make sure different officers weren’t knocking on the same doors.

The survey asked if people had contact with the police, how frequently and for what reason. It then asked them to rate the professionalism and their satisfaction and asked three yes-or-no questions about officer fairness, timeliness of police response and whether the police department keeps Palmer safe.

Residents were also asked what changes they’d recommend for the department and to suggest ways to improve it. The survey then asked similar questions of the city’s emergency dispatch center and city public works.

Boatright said the officers did the survey work when they weren’t busy performing other tasks, but he sees the surveys as a good use of police time.

“One of the things you’ve got to understand with doing something like this is it creates contact with people we don’t have contact with,” Boatright said.

It’s a form of outreach that is a big part of police work, he said.

“You’ve got to quit thinking of police as just going after bad guys,” Boatright said.

No officer told him of a resident who declined to be interviewed. The 62 people to whom the officers talked represented about 1 percent of the city’s population and a good randomly selected cross-section, he said.