Fairbanks police staff crisis forces city to close department four hours a day
The City of Fairbanks is moving to a part-time police department in August, ending 24-hour patrols and cutting back by four hours, leaving 8 a.m. to noon with no officers on patrol.
This is alarming, to say the least. If you call 911 in an emergency, what answer can you expect if you are within the City of Fairbanks? Same-day service? Maybe not.
Traffic enforcement? Forget it.
“We are going to a schedule where officers are on the road 20 hours in the day,” said Police Chief Ron Dupee. “There will be a supervisor at the department to filter the calls, but we will not (have) patrol officers” during those four hours.
I suggest you read the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner story Wednesday on this topic.
I want to commend reporter Jack Barnwell for the level of detail in this story and urge the News-Miner to give him the time and the opportunity to focus on this urgent matter.
It’s vital for community safety and for the economic future of Fairbanks that City Mayor David Pruhs and the city council play the leading role in addressing this problem and outlining the solutions. This is not an easy problem. These are not easy jobs to fill.
With the police department now down to 29 personnel we are far past the point where the workload and working conditions are attractive enough to recruit officers who will provide excellent service and stay here for the long term.
The city has recently decided to offer a $60,000 bonus to encourage officers from elsewhere to transfer to the city, but that won’t be enough to fill the ranks and provide stability. There are 14 vacancies in the department.
The News-Miner can help us sort through this situation by dealing with key questions such as how many officers we need on the streets, whether traffic enforcement by red light and speed cameras make sense, what it will cost and how it will be paid for.
We had 49 police officers in 1971 and 25 civilian support personnel, before the pipeline boom, when the town was much smaller than it is today and the areas outside the city were much more sparsely populated than they are today.
In 2004, Fairbanks had 41 officers and 14.5 civilian staff personnel.
In 2019, of the 45 available positions at the department, only 36 were filled, which meant that employees had to work hundreds of hours of overtime to cover the minimum requirements, not a good situation for the employees or the city.
The downward spiral has continued during the pandemic and afterward. Now, with 29 officers, there will be a supervisor in the office during the four-hour closed period, “but we will not have patrol officers,” Dupee said.
The typical shift now at the department is for two sergeants and a patrol officer.
The solution cannot be to reduce the budgeted number of officers from 43 to 37 and use those funds to pay more for those on the job now. That wouldn’t deal with the need for backups or prevent excessive overtime.
With the current staff at 29, “It is not sustainable for your family, for your health or for the services we owe the city,” said Captain Nate Werner, the News-Miner reported.
Followup stories are critical if the public is to understand the depth of this crisis, its origins and potential solutions.
This staff crisis has been decades in the making, created by the failure of city and state leaders to make public safety a priority, while never questioning the consequences of putting the city tax cap above all else.
The approach taken by most city politicians for decades not been to start by determining the level of service needed in Fairbanks and then decide whether it is affordable, but to use the mathematical formula of the tax cap as the only factor that counts, regardless of the level of service. Making everything fit under the tax cap means that city officials have neglected serious review of service levels.
The public safety staff problem has been exacerbated by recruitment and retention barriers ranging from the lack of a solid retirement system to the pandemic and the bidding war for police officers by departments across the state and nation.
Your contributions help support independent analysis and political commentary by Alaska reporter and author Dermot Cole. Thank you for reading and for your support. Either click here to use PayPal or send checks to: Dermot Cole, Box 10673, Fairbanks, AK 99710-0673.