At last Tuesday’s meeting of the Alliance City Council, Alliance Police Department Chief Philip Lukens shared his strategic plan for the department moving forward.
“The strategic plan kind of sets our ship in a direction,” said Lukens. “From that, I want to get some dialogue and some insight so as we go forward in the future, I know what you guys are looking at now so I can adjust for whatever needs to be done so I can accomplish our goals.”
Lukens said the department has defined three major goals: building community partnerships, preventing crime and disorder, and growing police “effectivity, efficiency and euphoria.” Lukens believes addressing these goals will help the APD be successful.
One project the department has been working on is developing community beats for officers. Lukens said they have 11 beats, which consist of different precincts of Alliance.
“The concept behind that is for officers to be working on a neighborhood level with neighbors,” Lukens said. “So, if we have a situation going on right now where there’s a concern about speed on a street, we have set out the speed sign, we’re working on coordinating with the residents, have a residential meeting and make a plan on how that works going forward.”
Lukens said another project the department would like to undertake would be upgrading dispatch. He said that the department is partnering with Box Butte County to share costs by consolidating. He said they have reached out to other communities, such as Chadron, to provide dispatch services for them to offset the cost share.
“Part of our concept in upgrading, aside from getting some cost share, is the fact that we need to become modern,” said Lukens. “You may say, ‘Well, you have a modern dispatch system.’ We do. But, we can’t even talk to a state trooper across the street. We don’t know if a state trooper is on a traffic stop. So, we have state troopers, they come and work our area, they come and check out a radio. We have patch technology. We have communication deficits that we need to deal with. The same thing happens for the fire department. We worked out a little bit of a patch going on right now that if a sergeant requests a patch, we will patch the fire channel with the police channel, because we have to do some encryption for safety reasons. That’s how we communicate.”
Lukens said it is expensive to run a dispatch center, which is why he is looking for ways to save money. He said the department is developing a five-year plan to address several issues, such as resource management. He noted a community survey the APD conducted, in which citizens listed the number one problem in the community as drugs.
“We have a problem with drugs, there’s no doubt about it,” Lukens said. “We have to do something about it. There are a lot of different strategies that have to occur to be able to effect that.”
Council Member Annora Bentley asked Lukens if he had any other takeaway from the survey. Lukens responded that the department needs to work on developing more community relationships.
Mayor Mike Dafney asked about the response from other communities approached regarding dispatch services. Lukens said the dialogues are still taking place.
“I have not seen anybody who is adamantly opposed that we’ve reached out to,” said Lukens. “there are some places we haven’t reached out to. Scotts Bluff County has a communications center already; they’re already taking care of a region. That would be over the top for us to try to do something like that. We’re not looking for that. We’re looking just to find some agencies who are, maybe, doing some things on their own to bring them in to help offset that.”
Following the presentation of the strategic plan, the council members approved the purchase of two 2013 Ford Interceptors to increase the number of vehicles in the Alliance Police Department fleet for the total of $51,600. Lukens said increasing the fleet would help decrease the levels of depreciation. He said the vehicles were equipped with the necessary resources, such as body cams, from the University of Nebraska. He hopes that adding vehicles into the rotation will cut down on the purchase of new vehicles.
Another item council approved is a Motorola Solutions Agreement, and an upgrade to the dispatch console for the total cost of $695,000. The city of Alliance received $424,000 from the CARES Act, which can be used toward the project.
“I think the biggest thing for us to look at with this upgrade is we want to get onto the state radio network,” said Lukens. “The state of Nebraska has already built towers all around here, and they’ve spent millions and millions of dollars doing so. I want to use their towers. By us getting on the network and using their system, we’re able to use their stuff. In general, this gets us on the broader scale.”
Lukens said the upgrade would create redundancies, which he said would be beneficial in a catastrophic situation. He said the dispatch center recently crashed for a couple of hours, which he noted was costly.
“Our dispatch center is failing,” said Lukens. “It’s out of warranty, and that needs to be fixed.”
The council also approved the purchase of the VIPER NEXTGEN911 System for the cost of $89,908.26. The system is expected to be installed in October.