Police request OK to seek federal funds for new officers

The City Council will hear a proposal at its meeting tonight on possibly getting three new police officers for Maricopa without having to pay their salary and benefits for three years.

Public Safety Director Patrick Melvin will scheduled to ask the council to approve a grant application for the Community Oriented Policing Services Hiring Recovery Program, a federal initiative administered by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The competitive grant program provides funding for newly hired officers as a way to increase the law-enforcement efforts in communities nationwide.

Melvin said the additional officers would help the Maricopa Police Department prevent crime in the city.

“Why wait for the burglary to happen? We try to go out and make contact and do proactive patrolling before the burglary actually occurs,” he said.

“The more officers I can have on the street, the more proactive we can be. In community-oriented policing, we’ll be making contact with our citizens … so we divert crime before it happens.”

If approved, the grant would pay for the salaries and benefits of the officers for 36 months, with the city assuming those costs in the fourth year. The projected annual salary cost for the three officers is $217,383, and the grant stipulates that the officers must remain on staff for a minimum of 12 months after the federal funding ends.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu put forth a similar proposal to the Board of Supervisors last week, asking for permission to apply for 30 new officers (see related story). The board denied his request, stating the overall annual cost of $2.3 million in salary in the fourth year and beyond was too much considering the county’s severe budget shortfall.

Melvin said Maricopa hired national public safety consulting firm Buracker and Associates a few years ago to develop a guideline for staffing the police department. Currently the department has 56 sworn officers to serve a population of 38,000, a ratio of 1.4 officers per thousand residents. Melvin said gaining three more officers would allow the department to stay in line with that ratio if Maricopa grows to the projected population of 40,000 within three years.

Melvin said ideally he “would love to get to some of the policing models nationwide of two officers per thousand.”

He said according to the Buracker study, other Arizona municipalities of similar size were able to achieve that ratio, including Apache Junction with 35,000 residents and 2.05 officers per thousand and Oro Valley (35,000, 2.86 officers per thousand).

“If you look around at some of the agencies around us, they’re a little bit closer than we are.”

While the grant would pay for salaries and benefits, the city would be responsible for all other costs, including vehicles. However, since Melvin said no new vehicles would be needed because if the grant is approved, he intends to hire brand-new officers, not lateral transfers, and the new officers would ride with veterans as part of their training.

“We would like to go more to the doubling-up (in vehicles) as much as possible,” he said. “If we send two officers to a call in the same vehicle, that satisfies the same thing as two different officers in two different cars.”

To view the complete agenda for the meeting, click here.

If you go

What: City Council meeting
When: Tuesday; Study session at 6 p.m., regular session at 7 p.m.
Where: Global Water Center, 22590 N. Powers Parkway