TRANSCRIPTION:
Sultan Police
Chief Fred Walser’s Introductory Remarks
August 30, 2006 Levy Election Kick-off Meeting
I will tell you right up front that this city is growing at a faster rate than even I had envisioned when I came here. And I came here in 1986 (sic; he means 1996), in January of ’86 (sic). And at that time people were talking about how Sultan was going to begin to grow.
The police department had four regular officers, one was assigned to the Snohomish County Regional Narcotics Taskforce. And they had seven paid reserve officers which are sort of like volunteers, but they paid them $8 an hour to be a cop.
In my former life I retired from the State Patrol. I’d never been exposed to reserve officers working as regular police officers. And so it was kind f a learning experience for me. And reserve officers, a lot of them are very dedicated individuals. And they volunteer a lot of their time and energy to being a police officer. I’ve never understood that. Because this profession is too demanding and, frankly, too dangerous. It’s not like being a volunteer firefighter at all. It’s very different. And it requires a whole lot of training. Police Officers, more and more and more have to go to training almost monthly to learn to do things, because in this profession we’re sociologists, we’re psychiatrist, we’re problem-solvers, we’re Superman, we are just about everything across the spectrum of our society, because we deal with everything. We have to be specialists. We have to understand how to investigate crimes, how to preserve evidence, how to identify it. And then what we do with it after we do that. So we spend a lot of time in training. Reserve officers just don’t have that kind of time. [They] just don’t have it. And along the way the State passed a requirement that reserve officers had to attend state-sanctioned reserve officer training academies and they had to be certified. And that meant that they had to expend 250 hours minimum in training before they’d get a certification. A lot of people like you that work for a living all day, and then to come home and go to classes at night, it’s pretty difficult.
So all of that being said, I began to see a decline in the quality of the reserve officers here. And what bothered me more was the lack of accountability. So I did away with the reserve program. I could see coming towards us, if we didn’t make some radical changes, huge liability issues in the form of lawsuits. And we’re living in one of the most litigious societies in the world, as a matter of fact, today. Everything we do in this business right now is predicated on, “Will we get sued for doing it or not?” And that’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s reality. Everything we do is loss-prevention so that you, the taxpayers, doesn’t pay out an enormous amount of money because one of my officers made a mistake.
Anyway, what I’m doing is giving you some background and history as to how we got to where we are right today.
The four officers we had here originally in the City were the most pathetically-paid individuals I’ve ever had the occasions to work with. The pay at that time was $12.50 an hour to be a cop, full-time. We were paying the reserves $8 an hour, we’re paying the regular officers $12.50. This is in 1996. And I’m a firm believer that you get what you pay for. In addition, for whatever reasons, no background checks were run on people. And I just came from a different “school” – a different environment. I wasn’t used to that, so I started doing some background checks and I had to fire a couple of people right off the get-go. And they sort of forgot to tell us they’d been convicted – tell the former administration or whatever—that they’d been convicted of crimes in other areas. And one took us to trial for two weeks and the jury came back and found that the City had overwhelming justification to fire him. Because he was a crook, working here. And that was pretty sad.
The City, because of different things, became a training ground for new officers. I would hire police officers. They’d put in their required probationary time. They’d become attracted to other departments – which I see other departments paid more, like Monroe, Snohomish, the County, Bothell, Everett – and they would move up and out. And we’d start all over again, hiring an officer and trying to equip that officer, and the costs back then was about $85,000. It’s not about $116,000 to hire and train a new entry-level officer for [unintelligible]. And it’s going up, not down.
So we moved along and the COPS grant under the Clinton Administration became a reality. And that was probably the best thing that ever happened to law enforcement for rural communities like ours, that I’m aware of. And we began applying for those grants. Those were three-year grants that would fund a new police officer, entry-level police officer. And so the City applied. It applied for three of them. And we were able to hire three new officers to replace ones that have left voluntarily or involuntarily and moved on. We hired three officers. And at the same time kept our strength from four, so we moved up to seven. And as things got better, we applied for more grants. We got a school officer. That’s another one.
And so we ended up, ultimately, with six COPS grants-funded positions. That’s not bad for a town like Sultan. And at the same time, I applied for grants for equipment. Still do. [unintelligible] ongoing. And a lot of the stuff that we had we got through Traffic Safety Commission grants at the state level, some federal grant moneys became available and we were able to buy a large – even our bulletproof vests we bought on federal grant money. Times were tough. Still are.
We got up to 11 police officers in 2000. And we were able to provide 24x7 with two cops on every shift. I even had the luxury on weekends of having three on our high-call periods. And Thursday-Friday-Saturday is our high-call time. And we had cops on bicycles, probably the most single effective patrol I ever saw. And I can’t tell you how many [drug?] arrests we made when we – when my guys pedaled up on them. They never even knew we were there [unintelligible].
So that went along and 911 hit. Mr. – what’s his name? Eyman? – He got his Initiative 695 passed. That devastated small towns. That’s your car tab tax roll-back initiative. That cost me right out of my budget, $180,000. City got a quarter of a million in tax – what they call tax equalization monies. In other words, a portion of it, of the money that you paid on your car tabs, we redistributed to cities like Sultan that did not have a strong retail sales tax base like Lynnwood and Edmonds, those areas. So that car tab money, then, was reapportioned out to cities like Sultan. And that’s kind of how we operated because we don’t have a lot of stores here in town for our retail sales. And life was good. We were going along okay for awhile.
And then the bottom fell out, with Initiative 695 and then the 911, and the economy going in the tank. It was Murphy’s Law back in 2001: Whatever could go wrong, sure as heck did. As a result, I lost three officer positions. We had to make some serious budget decisions here as we could not afford [it]. At the same time the COPS grants were running out. Three years from when we applied, and the end of the grant was running out. The well was just running dry. We could not afford to retain the officers that we had. Several of them – all of them – moved on [and] were hired by – The School Officer went to Everett. One went to Bothell. Another one went to Snohomish County. And there was another one in there -- two went to Snohomish County.
So we dropped back down in staffing and we got down to seven. And we’ve been kind of treading water at seven. Last year, last November, this city has had financial problems trying to cover all along. I’m not going to rehash this. If you have a question on what happened, this is a quick way of trying to say between the effects of the Initiative rollback and the economy and the lack of retail business coming back into the city to help buttress the tax loss, has affected us. We are funded completely out of the general fund, whereas the utilities are all dedicated money. You pay a water bill and sewer bill; that money that you pay supports that utility. And must. That’s why the rates go up and so forth: The costs go up, the rates go up. It cannot be a losing operation. But you can’t take that money out of, say, the sewer fund and put it in the police fund. It’s illegal. And the State slapped our fingers when we borrowed from that fund. And we had an adverse decision from the Auditor – a “Finding” they call it – from the State Auditor because of that fund manipulation. And that was just to try and keep Sultan’s head above water, so to speak, financially.
So we have been going along trying to make do. Haven’t made any major big purchases. I’m talking about me now. Even uniforms. We have a union contracts that says our officers are entitled to three sets of uniforms. That’s six uniforms: Three sets, summer -- three summer, three winter. None of us have that. So if a union agent – and I know there are union folks here – if a union agent ever came to me and said, “You’re not adhering to the union contract. We’re going to file a grievance against you,” we’re between a rock and a hard place, because that agent’s exactly right. We’re not. We aren’t. We can’t afford it. Some of my guys are even buying their own equipment, paying for it themselves. The new guys.
And I will tell you right now I’ve got 100% turnover in officers, and every officer here now is here because he and she wants to be here. They don’t want to leave. They’re very dedicated. They do not live in the city but they come here because they choose to work here. And that’s something. And we’re also getting inquiries now from other departments, other people that want to come here because our pay is finally competitive and they like their working conditions here, despite the Chief. So we’ve got three applicants right now. We’re in the process of doing a hiring. We’re going to hire another officer here, hopefully. But we’ve got three lateral applications, which I think is sterling because we didn’t have that for a long time, let me tell you.
So here we are, today. But if you look at this org chart – and if you don’t have one – this is called an organizational chart – and it has the positions, the current positions listed. And you’ll see one is vacant. That’s the one we’re trying to hire an officer for. I just had two officers, one just went off training, that’s Stebbins. He’s qualified now to be out on his own. And Ed Pereira is the other officer on the bottom. He’s still in training. He will be fully qualified and certified by October 1st. The training that these guys go through – and these are lateral officers that I hired – is mandated 12-week field training program. Mandated by the State. They then get a certification which means now they are a full-time regular police officer. And the State has really narrowed down our qualifications and so forth, and they tightly control it, which I – I belong to the Washington Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs. We have been working for the ten years that I’ve been here, to finally get regulations that say if you’re going to be a cop, you’re going to be at a certain level of standards. And if you deviate from that, or you go outside of those standards and there’s discipline issue(s) and you get fired, we’re going to de-certify you, which means you will never work in another State of Washington police service. Sort of like being a teacher. If you’re a teacher and you screw up – pardon my use of the term, ladies – and you’re fired for cause, you can’t your teaching certificate back. Same thing in police work now. You’re issued a certificate and if you’re adjudged to have committed offences, crimes, whatever – and there’s a regular process because I also am a member of that, of the Board of Governors that hears these cases of errant police officers – and we have fired and removed certification from seven this past year, cops that do stupid things -- And cops do dumb things. We all know that. [Question from Public: “And this is statewide?] Yes, this is statewide qualifications. We finally got that in. And that’s what I told you at the beginning. The officers that came here that sort of forgot to tell that they’ve been convicted of other crimes, we require – when I came here, the first thing I did was require a polygraph examination and a psychological examination. Nobody did that around here. I was astounded by that. Because when I went into the State Patrol, I had to do that. I just thought everybody did it. Well, there was no state regulations that require that. There is now. California does not require polygraphs. And so a lot of these dingbats are going to California. And down there they can’t inquire whether they’ve been convicted of crimes. It’s amazing to me. But guess where there’s a lot of problems? California Highway Patrolman that rapes and murders a woman that he stops on a traffic stop and it turns out he’s been convicted of that same sex crime in another state. That scares me to death. We’re getting away from that here. I’m rather proud of that, in a way, because we’re seeing a better caliber of police officer because of the background investigations that we’re required to do and the things that they have to do to be certified. And if they make a mistake, their certification is lifted and they cannot be a police officer anymore, so they can’t job-jump.
[Question from Dave Hellman asking why SPD does not have a flag. Flagpole was damaged in the last bad windstorm and SPD does not have $300 to replace it. Councilman Jim Flower offered to take a look at the flagpole and see if he can fix it.]
We have seven officers right now. Plus me. I’m a working chief. And I gotta tell you right up front, I can’t be a working chief and chief of police and run an agency and go out here and respond to calls for service, but I have to do that. I’ve been at work since 5:00 a.m. this morning. I’m the early guy out here. I work alone from 5 till 9 every day. Every call that I have to respond to, I have to write a report. And it goes to the prosecutor. I then have to do investigative follow-up stuff, the police work kind of stuff, and when I do that, it takes me away from preparing the budgets, from supervising other officers and doing a lot of things. And I’m not whining to you, I’m just telling you it’s not a good idea to have the chief of police out here pounding the pavement. It’s just not a good idea.
So right now we have seven officers, one vacant. We had a serious of budget cuts in November. And the City hired the Prothman Group to come in and do an assessment of the City and the state of its finances and its management, etc. and they did a pretty comprehensive look at how this city was being run and what its problems were, what are the fixes that they see to help us out. And they did a fairly lengthy examination and a report. And they said, Number One, there’s not enough money to fund all the police officers you have. Simple as that. There’s just not enough money in the well to fund a police officer. Well, at the same time, two of them left: Shelton went to Snohomish and David Lim went to Edmonds. I was mandated a 15% budget cut in November. That was two police positions. So we went down to five, road officers then. And we worked through the holidays with that number. And boy, I’ll tell ya, that’s tough. Because between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, that’s our busiest time of year. That’s when everybody’s out drinking. They’re doing stupid things. And our calls for service spike usually in November and December. But we coped. Then along came February, and Jay Cook, who was here – March, excuse me – March – Jay Cook had an offer from Snohomish County and he took it. He took a lateral transfer and went to Snohomish County Sheriff’s office, so now I’m down three people. And we were still able to cope a little bit – it was hard. Our officers changed their work schedule from 440 shifts of four 10-hour days, they went up to 12-hour days. And we began to fill the voids with overtime. Which means the officers would come in and work a day off to fill a void shift. And so we’re coping at that level.
Then my worst nightmare hit. Larry Marshall in April was involved in a car-motorcycle crash. A woman pulled out in front of him when he was riding his personal motorcycle. He laid it down and broke his ankle. And he had a compound fracture of the left ankle. And he, at the time, said, “Doctor says I’m going to be off a minimum of four months.” And I’m going, “Ah, man. That puts me down to four officers.” There’s no way that we could continue at that level providing you 24x7. We just…can’t happen.
So I worked out an arrangement with the Chief of Police in Monroe, who, he and I are really good buds because we’re both recovering State Troopers. And we thought we had a pretty good program worked out. And then the Monroe city council decided that they had to be very critical of the City of Sultan, and they turned what should have been a five-minute approval of the Memorandum of Understanding agreement into an hour and a half debate. And put a lot of conditions on there, including the costs, which they jacked up enormously to $65.50 an hour. And I came back and informed our city council of the problem and they were less than pleased with that whole thing and the bottom line is they did not sign the Memorandum of Understanding. Well, I still needed to hire police officers. And the city attorney said you can hire off-duty police officers because what they do in their own time is their own business, and make them employees of the City of Sultan. And that’s what I did. And I hired off-duty police officers, paying them $40.00 an hour instead of the $65.50 Monroe was going to charge us. So in essence, we’re saving about $25 an hour. That’s why you see Monroe cops – and Snohomish County deputy Sheriff’s, too – they stepped out. Both associations or unions contacted me and said, “What can we do to help you?” And I thought, Gee, what a great deal. And I’m a union guy. I gotta tell you right up front, I’m a real believer in unions, ‘cause when we are hurting, they step up. Both our associations did. And so they became employees of the City of Sultan. We paid them the $40 an hour and we were able to get back to reasonable shift coverage.
But that’s a crisis in manpower for us in the City. We could not continue going along that path for very long because the costs were more than if we had hired somebody. And Gordon [Gordon Hey, the City’s Interim Finance Director] penciled that out and said, “You know, it’s time to hire another officer.” Which we are right now in the process of doing.
[End of this transcription; MP3 audio of this statement and/or audio of the entire meeting can be obtained by emailing lorettastorm@seanet.com.]