Kelly Foreman
Editor’s note: This is part four of a four-day series of stories examining how state law enforcement issues are affecting Madison County’s agencies.
The Kentucky State Police already are ahead of the game in many areas such as wellness and technology. But the agency is looking to continue improving on some of those issues in the coming years.
The Department of Criminal Justice Training sponsored a symposium last week which brought together 18 panel members from across the state to discuss issues law enforcement officials are facing, address the concerns they predict will arise in the next 10 years and develop a unified plan to tackle those issues.
Using the symposium discussion as a guide, the Richmond Register interviewed Madison County’s four government law enforcement agencies — the Richmond Police Department, Berea Police Department, Madison County Sheriff’s Department and Kentucky State Police — to see where each agency stands on the issues as well as to inform citizens about what they can expect in the future.
More than 25 points of interest were discussed during the symposium, which can be broken down into four umbrella categories — money, wellness, resources and change.
Money
Panel members were concerned by the struggles to pay officers adequately and how low pay in some areas leads to losing officers and difficulty hiring new employees. Kentucky State Police Capt. Jeff Mayberry, commander for Post 7 in Richmond, said the state police have dealt with pay concerns from time to time, but the department always has had a leader who took up the cause before it got to be a morale problem.
“To say that it never comes up, I’m not going to say that, because it always comes up,” Mayberry said. “Are they complaining about it? Are we having issues because people think they’re not being paid enough right now? No. And in 21 years, I know I’ve been to post meetings and section meetings where we express concern about, ‘Hey you know maybe we’re falling behind with some of these bigger departments in the state.’
“But I’ve never seen it not be addressed when it does come to a critical juncture,” he said. “We’ve always been able to realize a resolution to it.”
The starting pay for new hires recently was raised, Mayberry said, and legislators recently approved $5,000 salary increases across the board, implemented in two steps. But in the future, Mayberry said the agency also is looking toward an avenue for troopers who want to stay troopers can receive increases in their salaries similar to those others receive for taking supervisory positions.
“We have some folks that don’t want to be supervisors,” Mayberry said. “That’s not their goal. They like being a state trooper and they don’t want to be a supervisor because once you get to be a supervisor, and the higher up you go, obviously you kind of migrate away from doing the actual police work. But you get compensated obviously for being promoted.”
The rank for a first class trooper already has been established, but the compensation for officers who achieve that rank has not yet been appropriated.
“The idea there was to kind of have a two-tiered career path to where you could still make more money but you would be still be a police officer out there doing the police job that you enjoy,” Mayberry said.
Wellness
Maintaining a level of physical fitness throughout an officer’s career also was a concern cited by panelists. Under the Police Officer Professional Standards, each officer must meet certain physical requirements to make him eligible for employment across the state. But past that, many agencies don’t require officers to maintain their health.
KSP officials saw that need several years ago and implemented a content based task test, an annual exam in which the officers must perform tasks similar to those they could face on any given day on the job, Mayberry said. When funds are available, officers who pass the test get 2 percent of their gross salary as a lump sum, or, during budget constraints, officers receive 40 hours of vacation time in lieu of the cash.
“Depending on your age, you have to do so many sit-ups in two minutes, so many push-ups, and then run a course, which is content based,” he said. “You run through the course and on one station you climb a farm gate. And you’re running the whole time when you’re doing this. You have to drag a 175-pound dummy 50 feet, dead weight, and the whole course is about a half a mile. And at the end there is a service weapon and you have to dry fire it with each hand.”
Troopers who came in after class 77 in 2000 are required to pass the test to keep their jobs, Mayberry said. Even officers like Mayberry who were employed by the state police prior to the enacting class still are required to take the test annually, it just isn’t a requirement to maintain their jobs.
“We recognize several years ago that we needed something like that in place,” Mayberry said. “So we’ve gotten in I guess on the ground floor and started that wellness program.”
KSP also already has programs in place to address the overall wellness of officers, including emotional and psychological concerns, an issue addressed during the symposium. Mayberry said the first line of defense against the personal problems of officers turning into departmental problems is fellow officers.
“I’ve worked places and your fellow workers come in and they’re not having a very good day for whatever reason.” Mayberry said. “It may be something at work, may be something at home. Talk to them about it. And if it’s bad enough, they might say, ‘Hey, let’s talk to a supervisor. Maybe a supervisor saw it and talked with them. That’s our first line of defense right there.”
Secondly, Mayberry said first-line supervisors such as lieutenants, assistant post commanders and ultimately himself keep an eye on those who may need to take advantage of the Employee Assistance Program, which employs sworn officers who are formally trained in counseling and set up to provide referrals to other confidential, professional services as needed.
“Police officers traditionally, they are the last defense between good and evil,” Mayberry said. “That’s what they teach you. They’re teaching it over here across the street right now, they’re teaching it down here at the academy, and they need to, because at some places you are it. And at some times you are it. But you’re also a human being, and we recognize that.”
Resources
Unlike local government agencies, KSP resources are distributed through state legislature. The command staff creates a budget to with input from officers in the field and the procurement section to project what the agency will need for the next two years. Past that, Mayberry said the agency is very active in a variety of grant programs.
“Any venue from training or enforcement for child car seats to investigating meth labs, we’re involved in all of those,” Mayberry said. “We have a financial and grants management section that the folks there, part of their job is to research new grants and see if they are applicable to state police and if it is something we can become involved in and be successful with. We also have a grants coordinating board and (potential grants are) run through them to decide if it is something we can use and we could achieve some reasonable success, then yeah, we’re going to apply for it.”
Some panelists cited a need to move toward more regionalized operations with multiple agencies in the future to expand opportunities for resources. With several outlets of mutual aid across both Madison County as well as the state, Mayberry said regionalization is not really a new issue for KSP, but one that has been refined over the years.
“I think that’s something that probably needs to be more concentrated is responding to natural disasters and that kind of venue and there are more memorandums of understanding when it comes to that sort of thing, but we’ve also got another entity in place before 9/11, that’s emergency operations centers that we’ve got in each one of these counties and emergency management. So I think regionalization has always been there and we’ve been practicing it, we just maybe didn’t call it that.”
Change
A branch already is in place with KSP which constantly keeps an eye on technology to keep up with changes and advancements.
“Our technology branch is kind of like our financial and grants management branch,” Mayberry said. “They consistently are testing new products, new software to see if it’s going to be applicable and if it’s going to help streamline the reporting process and the law enforcement process.”
But as other changes continue, such as a developing immigrant population, the state police is developing programs to meet the challenges.
“We started the Spanish immersion program because we saw a need that we needed to get some officers at each post and section trained to speak and understand not just speak and understand the language, but you also have to understand the culture. Therefore after the three-week intensive language instruction and cultural instruction they went to Mexico and lived with host families for a week or two weeks, it’s a pretty intensive program and we’re still doing it.”
The agency also has developed sources through its community-oriented policing efforts with local colleges and high schools to assist when necessary, Mayberry said.
“I’m not doing my job if I don’t (know my resources),” he said.
Kelly Foreman can be reached at kforeman@richmondregister.com or 624-6694.
