Wasilla to add new police officer

WASILLA — The Wasilla Police Department has received approval to add an additional officer to keep up with increasing demand resulting from the area’s rapid population growth.

The Wasilla City Council voted 5-1 on Aug. 25 to approve the personnel shift, which comes as Palmer Police have a full patrol roster and as the courthouse increases its case capacity by hiring an additional magistrate/master.

The department’s resources were straining to meet the uptick in demand, chief Gene Belden told the city council.

“I can only put about three officers on the streets at most times,” he said. “With one of them gone, we have two. If you have a traffic accident, you have one. If you have one with a prisoner, you have nobody.”

Occasionally, four officers could work a single shift, Belden said.

The department typically handles between 500 and 700 calls a week, Belden told city council members.

The calls range in severity from neighbor disputes to assaults, according to supporting documents.

The city will re-appropriate $118,230 from the city’s General Fund for the position, according to the draft ordinance. Of that, the largest amount will go toward paying $54,767 in regular benefits, with an additional $4,040 set aside for overtime pay. Health insurance, at $38,045 and Public Employee Retirement System contributions, at $12,937, are the next largest shares, according to the ordinance.

Statistics presented in support of the motion to hire a new police officer show a net increase of about 25 percent during the three busiest quarters of the year, roughly from April 1 until New Year’s Eve. Even first quarter statistics, which lag behind the other three quarters, show a 2 percent increase between 2012 and 2014. In reality, the high-traffic and crime portions of the year straddle quarters, Belden said.

“May through the middle of October. Those are our big crime months,” he said. “The rest of the time it’s usually cold and snowy, and that puts people indoors.”

Arrests show an average net increase of 51 percent across all four quarters. While citations increased for the busy second and third quarters, and decreased for the first and fourth.

Among the largest drivers: a 180-percent increase in first-quarter vandalism between 2012 and 2014, which was the single largest net category increase of the 12 primary call categories.

Between 2012 and 2013, for which a complete year’s worth of figures were provided, the overall number of calls for service increased 16 percent, with the largest increase coming from the traffic stops category, which saw a 67-percent increase between those two years. The second-largest increase was in DUI calls, which rose about 23 percent during those two years.

During the warmest portions of the year, the police department’s prominence rises as a percentage of the total dispatched calls from the MatCom Dispatch center, which also dispatches the Alaska State Troopers.

In the second quarter of 2014, police traffic accounted for roughly 48 percent of calls dispatched by the center, a seven percent jump from the first quarter, statistics show.

That’s reflective of the city’s position at the center of economic life in the valley, Belden said.

“We’re a small town or a small city in the middle of a big area,” he said. “We are the hub. Everybody comes and goes out of Wasilla.”

While the calls themselves can last as little as 20 minutes or less, the response isn’t the only time-consumer, Belden said.

“Actually, you spend 20 minutes on the street, an hour on the paperwork,” he said.

That’s in part because the department no longer hires police clerks to transcribe recorded interviews.

City council members like Leone Harris eventually said they were moved to support the motion, despite objections from the lone dissenter, Deputy Mayor A. Clark Buswell, based primarily on their personal experiences with crime.

“I kind of struggled over this one, but after today, I think I support this ordinance because in less than five days, I’ve seen too much police activity in my own neighborhood and it’s all been crime,” she said. “I’m not going to go into details, but somebody in my neighborhood threatened to take a baseball bat to me.”

Increasing demand on the police department is part of the growing pains, Belden said.

“We’re a small city with big city problems, is what it comes down to, basically,” he said.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269 or brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com