Washington police adding an officer

Washington Police Chief Jim Lester gave a presentation to city council members Tuesday night, making an ultimately successful pitch for the city to bring on a 12th police officer.

“Currently we have 11 full-time police officers, and in doing my research … it’s been close to 25 years since an officer was handed to the police department,” Lester said. “Patrol officers currently work 12-hour shifts, that’s something we started just two years ago. We try to have two officers on-duty all the time. That doesn’t happen all the time, but most of the time. It’s for officer safety, and it’s for the public’s safety.”

Lester said the new officer would relieve schedules and help prevent burnout for the department.

“We’re not in the position that other cities and communities are, where they’re struggling to hire officers,” he said. “They have a good wage, they have a good schedule, they work well together. I know I sound like a broken record but these are the best guys that I’ve worked with in the 33 years that I’ve done this, and they’re getting frustrated.”

He later added that it would help costs by reducing overtime demands. A slide from the presentation put the department expenditures at $1.3 million for 2021-22, more than this year’s planned budget but well below the $1.6 million high water mark in fiscal year 2018-19.

“You can’t control overtime,” he said. “If we have a major incident and we need extra officers and we happen to be out handling that, we’re going to pay overtime. Overtime’s not going to go away, but it will be greatly reduced.”

There was some community resistance to the move. Washington resident Bethany Glinsman criticized the proposal during the meeting’s public presentation period, suggesting the addition of professional, but unarmed, department staff to supplement law enforcement efforts in low-risk calls for service.

“The national conversation around policing is pushing for smaller police forces, those are bolstered by non-police professionals,” she said. “I hope you’ll seriously consider alternatives instead of immediately turning to an expansion of force.”

Lester disagreed.

“I’m sorry, I do not think it’s safe to even think about reducing the number of officers on staff,” he said. “And I don’t believe it would be safe to have unarmed responders responding to unknown calls. It may start out as a mental health issue or a dog barking issue that becomes a fight between neighbors, or somebody pulls a weapon, things like that.”

Glinsman proposed investing in community issues causally linked with crime rates, like mental health care and employment.

City Council member Danielle Pettit-Majewski sympathized with that sentiment but agreed with Lester on the need for a new officer, suggesting community investment as an additional crime control mechanism, rather than an alternative.

“I do think Bethany has a point, and I do think we need to be thinking about how we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said. “We need to support our law enforcement, but I also think, how can we as a community support some of those root causes? I’m a public health professional, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to prevent than to respond.”

Lester backed Pettit-Majewski’s idea but insisted on the necessity of a new officer in the short term.

“That would be definitely something we could look at, but right now, using triage, I need more law enforcement officers on the street,” he said. “If we had additional resources to follow some of those other things and offer them on the back side, that would be great, we definitely need that. It’s something we could definitely explore next year with a COPS grant or some grant funding that would help us with that.”

Mayor Jaron Rosien said the new officer could potentially fill community needs in similar aspects.

“Chief and I discussed at length, he was reluctant to include as part of his presentation, but from my perspective, what this potentially affords the city of Washington is the pursuit of an officer that is bilingual, or the pursuit of an officer that is a person of color, or the pursuit of an officer that is female,” Rosien said. “However, what comes first, as we’ve clarified, is qualified applicants, and that is what’s necessary, and not an applicant just because they check one box.”

After a half-hour discussion, council members voted unanimously to approve the start of the hiring process, and put a $53,000 budget amendment on the docket in several months. Lester said the new patrol officer was expected to start in mid-December.