By Earl Jones
Alliance
I’ve been reading with interest the latest discussions about the Alliance Police Chief on social media. I confess that I wonder if Chief Phillip Lukens’ residence is the best way to evaluate the job that he’s doing.
It seems to me that a better evaluation might be the fact that property crime is down over 38% and crimes against persons rate has dropped 5% since he became Chief of Police. Our crime rate is 33% below the national average. We may want to look at a third-party app such as www.newhomesource.com/learn/safest-cities-nebraska/ which rates Alliance as the 9th safest city in the state of Nebraska in which to live.
We might decide that we want to look at the satisfaction level of people who have had an interaction with the police department, which last week was at 91% satisfaction level, an A in almost any grading standard. Or we could look at the number of interactions between the police and the public, which is almost four times the national average. Doesn’t this mean that the citizens must have confidence and trust in the police force?
Chief Lukens has introduced neighborhood policing. We are part of the Downtown Deck, and we’ve had several meetings with our officer. We can interact with our neighbors, get involved together in community activities, and share our concerns about problems we see in our area. We now have the Bystander App, which lets anyone anonymously report concerns to the police department.
Another evaluation that we might use is the fact that the police force appears to be on the verge of becoming CALEA certified, the gold standard in public safety. Alliance is one of only four cities in the state of Nebraska which will receive that recognition. This certification from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies evaluates the type of training and resources that a police force has.
One of the concerns I’ve heard was that Chief Lukens doesn’t pay taxes in Alliance because he doesn’t live here. When the Chief was hired, he asked if he could live outside the city limits because his family would like to have an acreage and have some animals. He was told that that was acceptable if he lived within an hour of the city. The family found some property and gave an earnest payment. He was then told he couldn’t live there because it wasn’t in Box Butte County, which was never expressed to him before. This confusion, and some problems selling his existing house, caused him to lose his earnest payment and set back his plans for building a house and moving to Alliance. Chief Lukens works well over 40 hours per week before travelling to Colorado to spend weekends with his family.
Even though the Chief is not paying property taxes on land or a house in Alliance, he has written a number of grants. These grants will have brought in $1.5 million worth of personnel, technology, and equipment into Alliance when they are completed. It would take me several lifetimes to come up with $1.5 million in taxes paid to the City of Alliance.
Do we really think that the best way to keep Chief Lukens and to convince him to move his family to Alliance is to threaten him on social media? Or to use social media to complain about him and question everything he’s done since he’s been our police chief? How can we honestly think he hasn’t been good for our community? Shouldn’t we say, “Chief, we’d really like you to move here. What can we do to help?”