Virtual County Police Department Report

Virtual County Police Department Report

Virtual County Police Department Report

The police department is relatively young, created almost 55 years ago with a few police officers and a Chief who were farmers by trade. Only within the last twenty years has the department emerged as the primary policing agency within the county, ending a longstanding “turf battle” with the State Police. It has since become a modern police department with 400+ officers and 170 civilian support staff. The department is considered small in the large department category. It has two commands (the organizational chart is attached) and many divisions and units of a modern police agency. It was relatively stable department personnel wise until recently when veteran police officers, many in command or supervisory positions, began to retire after their twenty-five year career. (Their retirement marked the end of the major hiring drive in the early 1980s.)

This current trend has left commanders and supervisor, especially the first-line supervisor, with little experience in police administration. Historically, the VIRTUAL County PD has had its share of growing pains. The first farmers who sat on the county council, the people who empowered and then organized the department, hired their farmer friends as constables. This created a “good ole boy” environment that permeated the rank and file and directly impacted the way laws were enforced and the way the department was ran. That environment endured for many, many years. The department has never been rife with corruption, unusual based on the era in which the agency was created and its proximity to cities where police corruption was the norm. For many years the idea of a formal education for officers and commanders was not encouraged nor endorsed and, in fact, was thwarted.

Only since the mid to late 1990s was education suggested as a desirable trait for its officers. Currently, a majority of the department has more than two years of college with polices in place requiring all commanders to have Bachelor?s degrees or higher.

Of the eight chiefs since its inception only two have been hired from outside the department and their terms lasted only as long as the County Executive who hired them, four years. The last three chiefs have all come from within the department and have led the agency for a combined 18 years. A majority of the department is white and male and is not statistically as diverse as the community it is charged to protect. The current command staff does not accurately reflect the minority rank and file and does not even mirror the current diversity of the county heads and administrators.

While the PD is now considered a professional and progressive police agency, it does (and has) face many hurdles. The department is young in terms of tenure for its officers. Over 60% of its current staff, sworn and civilian alike have been hired within the last five years, an astonishing fact. This clearly is reflected in the first-line supervision, the increasing number of ...