08-29-18 Personnel and Finance (#5)

Home Browse Search

CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK He went on, The larger one (1) in our allocation is our insurance for liability. In the past, the liability insurance has been adjusted to create a balanced budget in the General Fund. This ye , the reflection in the allocation is the full amount being allocated to the Police Department. So the allocation is hitting full boar on the Police Department this year. One (1) thing I wanted to point out that is now in the COIT, under other services is that the leases have gone down dramatically. We are paying off leases that are in the General Fund so we no longer have that expense in the General Fund but we do have the expense in the COIT where the leases are paid for, so, that goes through another fund and doesn't really hit the General Fund. Unfortunately, I'm going to back up and talk about some personnel changes we would like to do. On the addition side of personnel changes,we would like to add a Director or Manager of Purchasing and Logistics. What this would do is civilianize our support services at the Police Department. In the past that position has been held by a sworn officer at a Captain's rank or above so we would like to civilianize this position and have them do more. Hopefully we can have that position. Right now, Chief Lancaster is doing a lot of that heavy lifting with that with a few other officers helping him out. He continued,The next position would be a Crime Intelligence Analyst for social media. We have a Crime Scene Analyst and she does a wonderful job analyzing the crimes and everything but this position would more of a proactive position. The hope is they can get onto social media and maybe pick up chatter going in a direction that we don't want it to go and maybe stop a violent crime. Chief Ruszkowski stated, With that, I would like to make a side note. We are looking at every position on the Police Department and asking if we absolutely need arrest powers to have these positions. The Logistics position is one (1) we are looking at, obviously. Do we have to have a police officer doing that? The answer is no, we don't. The position needs to have knowledge of police officers but when there is collaboration involved, it is a pretty short order where that would occur. The social media position came from a variety of sources. None more important, or as important than, our core group with Group Violence Intervention. This is being done all over the country and to go with our Group Violence Reduction Strategy,the social media component is one (1) thing we have been missing big time. Now we have that Crime Analyst and she does all the mapping and hot spots and all that intelligence stuff. That is fine because we know where to be to deter the bullies from coming on the playground and picking on everyone else. We also know who the bad people are and those locations. But it is always going to be a punitive component. How do we get out of that punitive component? One (1) way is to stop these before they happen. We can do some intervention and prevention before it becomes something horrible. Too much time passes while we have been trying to figure that out. That is why we are looking at social media specifically. There are keywords and buzz words that tip off danger and then we can intervene. Mr. Cocanower stated, Some of the changes include changing the Alarm Specialist title to Data Entry Specialist. She's got both Alarm and Data Entry so we are going to make her a data entry specialist. With our data entry specialist and our records specialist, these are people that are entering the reports and are getting the records for individuals coming in and asking for them. We have people working all three (3) shifts. It is a twenty-four seven (24/7) operation. We've been working with HR to develop a shift premium. So if they are on the afternoon shift, they would make a certain dollar per hour more. I think we were looking at fifty cents per hour($0.50/hr). If they are working midnights and are giving up family time,we would give them a dollar more there. I think it is similar to some of the other departments that have a twenty-four seven(24/7)operation. EXCELLENCE I ACCOUNTABILITY I INNOVATION I INCLUSION I EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 1 227 W.Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 466011 p 574.235.9221 if 574.235.9173 1 TTD 574.235.5567 i www.southbendin.gov