Published: January 31, 2008 08:36 am      

RPD under evaluation

More than 100 citizens volunteer opinions

By mid-morning Wednesday, a group of nine Kentucky Regional Community Policing Institute assessors had interviewed about 100 people in their efforts to assess the Richmond Police Department.

The group began Monday and will be in Richmond until Friday, attending community functions, conducting focus groups, riding with police officers and interviewing citizen volunteers.

“We have been working from about 8 in the morning to about 9 or 9:30 at night,” said RCPI Associate Director Ed Brodt.

RPD Chief Larry Brock invited the assessment team into the department to evaluate multiple issues as they relate to community policing. The study additionally is designed to help RPD officials gain an understanding of how the community perceives the department.

The goals are “to provide a useful tool for direction and assistance in transitioning or advancing community policing efforts in a community, to provide baseline information for use by the department in developing its community-oriented policing efforts and to provide on-site organizational development assistance,” an overview from the on-site assessment process states.

The nine assessors include a retired business executive, two college professors and six with backgrounds in law enforcement. The assessment as of Wednesday morning was “right on track,” Brodt said. At the conclusion of the week-long assessment, the team members will create a report which eventually will be available for public review.

“We encourage the department to make it well known and to use this as kind of a road map of things they can do and things they can put in place to create a more community-oriented atmosphere,” Brodt said. “It takes a while to get all of this together. It may take a couple months. It could be even longer than that.”

The report, which typically is about 90 pages long, will include information about goals, objectives, missions, vision, structure and climate of the department, Brodt said.

“The report mirrors the interviews,” he said. “A great deal of it does deal with perception, but perceptions are somebody’s truth. So one of the values of this report is that if there are conflicting perceptions that surface, it gives the agency an opportunity to, first of all, know that. Second of all, it opens up lines of communication to address those perceptions.”

When asked for a sneak-preview of RPD’s evaluation, Brodt said Richmond is not unlike a lot of other places the team has been.

“Communication is almost always an issue,” Brodt said. “How we communicate, structures we have in place to allow communication or impede it, and I’m sure we’ll make a lot of recommendations there.”

Brodt cited an example of a potential new homeowner who was interested in the crime statistics in the neighborhood he was considering investing in.

“I ought to be able to easily get that information,” he said. “And, if I’m a citizen in a neighborhood, one of the things that I might be interested in is knowing if the police spot a trend. Say, cars are starting to be broken into in my neighborhood, I’d like to know that. So you need to have lines of communication that are established that provide me that information as part of the service component of the police department.”

Problem solving also is an area Brodt said he would anticipate coming up in the report.

“Anytime the police go to a run, there is a problem,” he said. “And I think, for the most part, it is better after they have been there. We want to see police officers and agencies do problem solving on a much higher level. For example, you still have to address crime individually. It has to be solved individually and it has to be prosecuted individually. We also know that crime can be related. There are victims that are repeatedly victimized and there are reasons for that. So we need to have a database system that allows us to identify people who are repeatedly victimized and look at that as a bigger problem. And if there is something we can do to help them to keep from being a repeat victim, that is a good thing.”

RPD Maj. Mitch Brown has been helping to coordinate some of the interviews and assisting the assessors during their stay. Wednesday, Brown said he was pleased that there has been such a great response from the community. All of the command staff and a few of the detectives have been involved in the interviews and the assessors have talked to patrol officers as they ride with them on calls.

There were several individuals in the community who Brown said the assessors were interested in interviewing. Many of them volunteered and nearly everyone who was approached about participating agreed, he said.

“Everybody seems to have a great attitude about it,” Brown said. “I am very excited about the results.”

Kelly Foreman can be reached at kforeman@richmondregister.com or 624-6694.