Letter to the Editor for July 14, 2022
Published 1:30 pm Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Throughout my career in policing I told numerous subordinates, colleagues and superiors that if you want to work in public service, the public has to come first. The priorities that you set for your agency and for yourself, must reflect your commitment to the community you serve. That thought process, unfortunately, seems to have been lost within portions of the Baker City government. The recent discussions about 20-hour police coverage and/or one officer on a shift at a time, reflects a mindset that does not put the safety of the community first.
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This dilemma about short staffing is nothing new for the Baker City Police Department, as alluded to by the city manager and chief of police. Even when fully staffed and trained, the Baker City Police Department operates at minimum patrol coverage, which has two patrol officers on shift 24 hours a day, with a sergeant on an overlap shift. However, with vacations, sick leave and open positions, the sergeants end up working regular patrol shifts the vast majority of the time. If you lose another officer from a team, you have to pay overtime to cover the shift. If you lose that officer for an extended time, you are faced with the same dilemma the department has now, which we have seen numerous times through the years.
What we did for the 12 years I was chief of police was to temporarily move a detective back to patrol and a few times we had to move both detectives back to patrol. You see, this is where prioritizing the community first comes into play. A municipal police department has no greater priority than to provide patrol officers who can respond to an emergency, immediately upon notification. That means 24 hours a day. It also means that you must have two officers on a shift so they can safely respond to high risk calls immediately and not have to wait for backup. I will grant you that the call volume drops dramatically at 3 a.m.; but I will also tell you that if there were only one spouse being beaten, or one convenience store clerk being robbed, or one home being burglarized, or one vulnerable child missing during those hours in a year’s time, all the labor hours would be worth it.
I realize that Chief Duby came from a different policing background, having spent his entire career with the Oregon State Police. He never had to prioritize the safety of an entire community. I will argue that the vast majority of municipalities in the state prioritize patrol over investigations. It certainly worked in Baker City through the years, garnering the city the distinction of being named the safest city in Oregon at one point. I daresay that’s not the case now.
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The last thing I want to add about the 20-hour shift proposal is the fact that it does nothing to address the short staffing. It takes just as many bodies to run 10-hour shifts as it does to run the current 12-hour shifts. All you save by going to 10-hour shifts is some accrued comp time for the officers working those shifts. With the 2-2-3, 12-hour shifts the police currently operate under, each patrol officer works on average 42 hours each week. Thus, they accrue 8 hours of overtime each month, which goes into their comp account. If the city did drop to 10-hour shifts, I would guess the standby pay and overtime pay for call outs would not be a good financial trade off.
As mentioned previously, none of these current issues are new. And the solutions aren’t so hard to figure out, when you start with the belief that the community has to come first.
Wyn Lohner
Baker City