West Liberty police chief Joshua Houser is asking the city council to consider hiring a seventh full-time officer for the department.
During a work session prior to the Oct. 1 meeting, Houser made a presentation outlining four factors that led him to believe another officer is needed: officer safety, time off allowances, types of calls the department has been getting and more community involvement.
Houser explained his own personal experience when he was a young officer with the department. The night shift runs from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., and Houser said he was often the only officer on duty for the whole shift. He said the response time from Muscatine for backup was at least 20 minutes. “Having to handle some domestics and stuff alone is a very tense situation, especially when you know that somebody’s going to be arrested. Or even if it’s a more escalated situation, like a bar fight and stuff like that. Trying to handle that alone is very tense and very taxing, physically and mentally.”
During escalated situations, Houser said it would be safer to have a situation where two officers would be able to respond to the scene at once. “Other departments, they’ll wait until another officer can arrive before the first officer approaches. Here, we don’t have that luxury because if we wait, you know somebody’s potentially getting further assaulted or further injured, or they could continue to escalate without any intervention.” He said in the event of domestic disturbance calls where injury has already occurred, statistically it is also more likely that an officer will be attacked as well.
Even traffic stops can be dangerous, because “we have no idea who’s in the car, if they have a warrant the next town over or anything like that. As soon as we stop them, like ‘Hey, we saw a headlight out’ … that’s as much information as we have until we get up there and we can identify people.”
Investigations are also time consuming, with Houser saying he recently took on a child abuse investigation because his officers were backed up on other cases. There are also administrative investigations. Houser said if there should happen to be an officer-involved shooting, even if there were no injuries, it could still take up to three months to clear the officer to come back from administrative leave.
Houser said that most of the current officers have families with children, and it was important to them to maintain a healthy work-life balance. He also said the department wasn’t able to have as large of a presence at the recent Children’s Festival as it would have liked, due to officers having worked so many hours.
He also expressed concern if one of the current officers were to be injured and unable to work for an extended period, that would mean mandatory overtime for the rest of the department. In one instance, an injured West Liberty officer was unable to work for five-and-a-half months.
Houser said law enforcement has changed dramatically in the last few years, with fewer people going into the profession. With less qualified candidates in the application pool, officers often leave smaller departments within just a few years in search of higher pay and more opportunities.
Burn out is also a factor. City manager Lee Geertz said that the largest turnover period in the department was during a time when there were not enough officers. “The morale of the department was down, and because they weren’t able to utilize their time off, they became burned out. They became exhausted.”
Houser said the number of calls to the West Liberty Police Department has trended upwards in the last year, as have the number of what he termed “time-consuming calls.” These can include child abuse, death investigations, fraud/identity theft, other forms of theft, sexual abuse and keep the peace calls, which can range from helping with child custody transfers to overseeing property removal.
Community involvement continues to be a priority for the department, though Houser said that at times it has had to take a backseat to investigations. He said that his current crop of officers enjoys community policing. Several officers came to West Liberty from larger departments because they wanted the opportunity to do more outreach. “The community treats us like rock stars, and we want to be there for them, and we want to be out there at these events,” said Houser. “It’s just, with our limited resources, it makes it difficult at times, because we have to take priority of anybody in danger or make sure they handle investigations. And we just don’t get to do as much of that as we would like. An added officer would give us more opportunity to have that community outreach that we’ve all grown accustomed to.”
Geertz added that in addition to community and outreach, having a trusted department allows for “the opportunity for recruitment for the next generation of police officers.” She said that having a safe community, especially one with a diverse population like West Liberty, also ties to upward economic development.
She said that if the department were to hire another officer and redistribute the workload, this may also allow Houser to work to create a reserve officer program, an idea which had received some interest.
“As we have talked about, there’s great trust in Chief Houser under his leadership. If we (had) the opportunity to provide the seventh officer, I believe he would utilize that officer as intended and it would begin to bring back more of that quality of life and work-life balance for officers so we can sustain.”
Geertz also praised Houser for being willing to work patrol and do investigations in addition to his administrative duties. In turn, Houser praised his officers for being willing to pitch in and work together.
“One of the complaints I get from my officers is that I forget to be the chief sometimes,” said Houser. “Because I just throw myself in just to try to help out and do my part … because I don’t want anybody to feel like they’re overworked, or they can’t get a day off when they need it. I see the need; I want to do something to help.
"Getting us another officer would do that. Like Lee said with the part-timers. In an ideal world, if we could have a retired police officer live here in town, just waiting there on our beck and call, that we could just call up for anything that happens. But unfortunately, that person doesn’t exist. So, all the part-time officers right now, they all work a different job that they do full-time, so they can kind of help us when it fits their schedule, not when a need is present.”
Mayor pro tem Cara McFerren, who along with council member Tim Parizek was present at the work session, asked how much West Liberty relies on mutual aid from Muscatine County. Houser said it was important to him to not be too reliant on the Muscatine County Sheriff’s Department for assistance, saying he was also aware of their current staffing needs. He said it was important for the department to have a mindset that “this is West Liberty. We have a police department. If we can handle it, that’s our responsibility.” He said that he only wanted to utilize county assistance in “dire circumstances. I believe the citizens of West Liberty deserve to have the police service they’ve become accustomed to.”
Geertz added that relying on mutual aid puts a fiscal burden on the county, with deputies having to work overtime. She said West Liberty was in a position to provide aid to the county. “It’s important for us to build that rapport with the county. Not the rapport being taking advantage of them rapport, but working with them.”
Ultimately, Geertz said that the need for another officer was great enough that “we will make it work, and we will pull funding from where we need to, and we will get creative with how we’ve got to do that funding, because we are past the point of talking about it … It is a need. It is definitely a need. I’m not going to take it away from the fire or the EMS – that’s a different conversation – but just being able to focus on our police department right now.”
Parizek praised the department for working to build a culture of community involvement, which would hopefully lead to officers staying in West Liberty longer. “That would be awesome if we can get an established group that will be here for a while.”
Houser agreed.
“That’s one of the options with getting another officer, is that we could afford to have somebody attend the police academy and get somebody in earlier in their career. That way, they can build longevity here at West Liberty versus always having to snag the certified officer, because we have to plug them in immediately. We can take our time now getting somebody potentially certified and that way they can grow with the community. We’ve had interest, younger applicants that want to be officers, that want someone local and to be here. But unfortunately, we’ve had to grab the certified people because … we need to put them in the schedule immediately.”
Houser also said the effects on his current officers were personal to him. Prior to being chief, he had been an officer in West Liberty during a time of high turnover, and his own experience with being burned out led him to leave the department and go elsewhere.
“I just don’t want anybody to have to face that same decision. Because we have a really good crew of guys here and they want to be here. They love the department; they love the people. I just want to get them the resources that we can keep them here and we can grow that community.”
McFerren asked how much money the city might need to move in order to fill the position. Geertz said she estimated about $100,000. That would not only include the salary and regular benefits, it would also cover other benefits such as training and uniforms.
She said this may mean reallocating funds from some other departments. “I don’t want to take away from what (other departments) are doing, but at the same time, we have to balance out the safety and wellness of our officers who are providing our safe community and the economic development picture.”
However, she said adding an extra officer could also reduce the amount of overtime payout the city sees. She said the city was averaging up to 100 hours bi-weekly in overtime pay if officers have to pick up extra hours during shift changes. “Overtime is extreme, because whether they want that overlap or not, a lot of times when officers are doing shift chances, they have multiple calls. So, when you look at time and a half on top of their 12-hour shifts, it’s costing our city budget. By adding the other officer, chances are we may not see that big of an influx in our budget because if we’re reducing overtime, that is going to make up the difference.”
Geertz said that over the last few years, “we’ve seen some pretty traumatic cases that have occurred, and we’ve had officers that have had to go to some really difficult scenes, unfortunately. My concern is, along with that burnout, is that we weren’t even able to prioritize their wellness and allow them to seek some additional counseling or just be able to have a little bit of downtime to be able to get a breath from some traumatic scenes that they’ve had to manage.”
McFerren also asked if there might be an opportunity to have a school resource officer with the West Liberty School District. Houser said the department had been approached by the district, especially in light of threats of violence and fights at the high school. He said the department was still following up on that request. McFerren asked if it might be possible for the district to chip in financially if they were to get an SRO. “Yeah, that’s still another option we are looking at,” said Houser. “We just haven’t gotten to that point because we had stuff come up.”
“There’s nothing set in stone,” added Geertz. “But the way we hit this around is that, if in the future there is an opportunity for an SRO for one of our officers, then they serve during the school year, but then that provides us an opportunity with that individual for other officers to take vacations … during June through August.”
Houser said there had been discussions on an SRO with the school board and with superintendent Shaun Kruger. “The school board has to be on board, because we can’t move forward with getting some of the grants. I’ve talked to the superintendent and told him that if the school board pretty much gives us a thumbs up that they would approve an SRO, that could still be contingent upon us receiving the grants. But we can’t do it without their approval, so we’re kind of stuck at a little bit of an impasse here. We just haven’t had a chance to reapproach the subject since the school year has started.” He said that there has been an uptick in police presence at the school since August.
Geertz said the next step would be to bring an action item for hiring an officer, as well as a budget amendment before the council. She hoped to be able to set a public hearing on the matter by the first meeting in November. She added that the department had already received interest from several candidates. “We just have to make sure we have council’s approval that we can go ahead and get that position filled.”