There are 19 of us in the class, which is being held in a training room at the police station next door to City Hall. Last evening's class was hosted by Capt. John Wilk and Lt. Jim Hack. These two men are responsible for all of the hiring and training done in the department and took it upon themselves to introduce us to what we will be going through for three hours a week over the next 10 weeks.
Essentially, this class was really just a chance for people to familiarize themselves with the syllabus as well as to get a tour of the department. Both of the men presenting were personable guys, and it's easy to see that they're well-suited to hosting this class. The Police Department offers the course as part of its community outreach effort and as an attempt to show the citizens their side of how policing a medium-sized city works. There were some interesting things that came out of the discussion:
- The Police rely very heavily on the drug forfeiture laws to fund equipment purchases. One of the guys actually said, "we really make a lot of money off of drug busts." According to the Lieutenant, that's fortunate, because they have a hard time getting the city to pay for any equipment outside of their squad cars or their regular operating expenses.
- Technically, the Police Department is understaffed if you use the rule of thumb which indicates you should have 2.5 officers per every 1,000 residents. At approximately 127,000 residents that would amount to a force of 317 officers. Sterling Heights has 170 or so, so they're well below the level they would have even at 2 officers per 1000 residents. Paradoxically, the city's low crime statistics acts as a disincentive for the city to fund a larger department.
- There are three shifts in the department, with considerable overlap between the shifts. At any one time there are approximately 15-20 cars out on patrol, servicing nearly 60,000 runs per year. This compares to the Fire Department, which serves all of the EMS in Sterling Heights at ~12,000 runs per year. During the overlap period they might briefly have as many as 30 cars out on the road at peak times during the year.
- The department has several different divisions, e.g. patrol, etc., but is undergoing a significant management restructuring after the departure of the previous chief two years ago. As a result, the number of captains has been reduced through attrition from four to two, and there has been a corresponding consolidation of the department's divisions. Captain Wilk himself is in his last 14 or 15 months of service as he has nearly 30 years on the job and is obligated to retire at the end of that time.
- As both of the men mentioned, the Police Officer's union has a strong presence in Sterling Heights. There was mention of the fact that there are two officers assigned to keep the jail operation under control at all times -- regular officers that are rotated into the assignment from their duty on the road. It was suggested apparently that perhaps it doesn't require a full-fledged police officer to keep an eye on his half of 24 cells (not counting the drunk tank and the other holding cell), but the union balked at this. There was another mention of the union's strength during another part of the discussion as well. Clearly it is a force to be reckoned with.
- Mention was made of last year's failure of a measure on the ballot which would have funded a new police department headquarters on city-owned property a few hundred feet down the street from the current location. Both of the presenters mentioned the age of the building (it was first occupied in 1980) and their disappointment that the tax levy didn't pass. On the same day, another measure passed that funded the modernization of several of the Fire Department stations, so I definitely got the sense that there is a little inter-departmental rivalry going on. Like most of the voters, I didn't feel the Police Department had really made their case as well as the Fire Department had. The Fire Department clearly had older, more dilapidated buildings and a more demonstrable need for additional space for equipment and modernization of their buildings with the introduction of female firefighters to the force. After the tour of the police building concluded yesterday, my impression remains the same. The building they're in, despite their characterization of its age, really does not give the impression of being inadequate to the task of housing the police. I suppose that if I had a tour of more than one police department, perhaps some of the differences would stand out and it would be easier to see why the cops want to update their facility, but taken on its individual merits as a building, I'm having a hard time seeing much wrong with what they've got. I think they're going to be right where they are for a long, long time unless they can make their case stronger.
- The events surrounding the Iraq win of the World Soccer Cup earlier this summer, in which hundreds of people spontaneously came out to celebrate -- all in the streets around my house -- did catch the department off guard, especially the near riot I witnessed at 1AM on the following morning as two groups of celebrants, numbering approximately 400, shouted at each other from opposite sides of Ryan Road just north of 15 Mile Road. The cops both kind of shook their heads and said, well, we learned a few things from that experience about how we would handle it if it came up again, but we had absolutely no preparation for it.
I have to admit that I have some misgivings going into the program. Personally, I know the police to be a necessary part of our society, but I also know that there are guys who end up in the job who don't belong there because they tend to go a bit mad with power. Having some libertarian sensibilities in my character, I tend to mistrust government in general, and the police really embody some of that mistrust for me. I think this will be an interesting program for me, because unlike the case with the Fire Department, I really do have some preconceived notions about the police. This course will either really confirm some of those preconceptions or give me a new way of looking at the force. I'm looking forward to seeing how that turns out.
One thing that clearly is an issue for me are the drug forfeiture laws that I mentioned earlier. These guys are pretty enthusiastic about the money that these laws bring to their department, and I'm uncomfortable with the fact that there is a financial incentive to the police for some of these really draconian drug laws to be enforced. It opens up the specter of "policing for hire", which only serves to exacerbate the problems that I believe the so-called 'war on drugs' has brought to our society as a whole. On the other side of the coin, the other 16 or so people in attendance didn't seem to have a problem with this at all, judging by their reaction. Of course, the guy on the one side of me was deaf and the guy on the other side was asking non-sequiter questions about diversity on the force, so maybe some of that apparent attitude can be discounted. Wholesale.
The group of folks I'm in there with range between ages 27 to someplace in their mid seventies, with a strong bias towards the older end of the range. There are three other people in the class which are under 40, near as I can tell, and the ones that are below the median age are mostly female. One of the overall group is a "happily divorced" apartment manager, one is a slightly neurotic fifth grade teacher, and yet another guy is an immigrant from IDon'tKnowWhere-istan. There are quite a large number of retirees -- it looks like the McDonald's breakfast club in there. I'm not trying to suggest that there is anything wrong with this group of people -- indeed, I'm a character of sorts myself -- but it's going to make for an interesting 10 weeks of class. Curiously there are no Chaldeans in the class, which strikes me as strange considering their large presence in the city and the interest I would presume they have in how their community is policed. The only person of color is the immigrant mentioned above, and really, he doesn't strike me as being of Arabic descent despite my reference to nations of the world ending in -stan. So it's a bunch of older white guys and some middle-aged women with the oddball youngster such as myself in for good measure. In contrast with the guys that showed up for the Fire academy program, suffice it to say most of these folks are not the sort that should be climbing ladders.
One final point before I close: the tour of the jail, which is where we spent most of our time, put the words "Scared Straight" into mind. The Sterling Heights Police Department jail is the *last* place anyone in their right mind would ever want to end up. It is the definition of dreary; the place is probably best described as a rat-infested shithole minus the rats. The drunk tank, with its yellow, easy hose-off rubberized surfaces probably epitomizes the I'm sure sordid experience of one's first contact with the criminal justice system. I'm sure that everyone that comes through there ends up needing a good hosing down themselves after the experience is over. I don't go to bars much. After seeing that place, I've got all the more reason to stay home.
