Building trust. Meeting community needs. Using creative problem-solving.

Those goals reflect the new direction of the Traverse City Police Department, which is undergoing an organization-wide overhaul Interim Chief Jeff O’Brien hopes will better connect the department with the community. O’Brien’s plan: To take the TCPD staffing structure and “flip it upside down,” moving away from a centralized model – where officers handle a wide spectrum of patrol areas, crimes and complaints – to a localized system in which every officer is assigned to a specific quadrant of the city.

The department has employed community police officers (CPOs), or district-specific officers, in the past. But budget cuts and attrition over the last decade have reduced the number of CPOs from six to just two. O’Brien’s goal now is to convert every TCPD officer into a CPO, dividing the city into four sections that will each have a sergeant, four day officers and three night officers.

“Each officer is still responsible to Traverse City as a whole…but he’s assigned to a specific area and has ownership there,” explains O’Brien. “(The officer) isn’t just driving around in a vehicle. He’s building trust and relationships in that service area: Going to the neighborhood meetings, responding to complaints there, walking kids to school, listening to the needs of those residents.”

Under the CPO system, officers become “advocates” for their neighborhoods, O’Brien says, familiarized through repeated exposure to the unique needs of each district. “It’s not just crime…it can be quality of life issues,” O’Brien says. “If a street light is out, or a certain drain always clogs after it rains, that officer can help bring attention to that.”

Officers are also being encouraged to use what’s called a SARA approach to problem-solving: scanning, analysis, response and assessment. The system emphasizes proactively identifying issues facing the community (scanning), analyzing possible solutions, implementing a response and assessing how well the solution works. O’Brien gives the example of Dann’s House – a wet house he pursued after repeatedly encountering the same group of individuals struggling with chronic alcoholism – as an example of SARA in action. “We’re in the final assessment stage of that project now,” O’Brien says.

As part of the restructuring, the TCPD has received a $5,000 grant from Rotary Charities to host community engagement sessions and gather input from stakeholders – ranging from business owners to school leaders to citizens to government bodies – on the department’s new direction. A kick-off forum is slated for January.

“Our community partners are going to be our eyes and ears on what we’re doing right and wrong,” says O’Brien. “Are we looking at crime correctly? Do we need to allocate more resources to traffic, or drugs, or schools? We’re going to take those suggestions…and collate those into a plan to meet the community’s needs.”

The TCPD is also looking at new tools – including a crime map that lets both officers and residents track patterns of illegal activity in Traverse City, and an updated website with community feedback forms – to create more “transparency and engagement,” says O’Brien. In a post-Ferguson era where community distrust can be an ongoing challenge for law enforcement agencies, O’Brien hopes TCPD’s new approach will help break down those barriers.

“The bottom line is that as a police officer, I can’t do my job without citizens telling me what’s going on,” says O’Brien. “I have to have trust with community members…and vice versa. I think it’s important we walk into this (process) and be able to take criticism as an agency. How can we change? We’re willing to hear that.”

In Other TCPD News…
Traverse City Manager Marty Colburn says he’s narrowed a field of 48 candidates for the TCPD’s open chief position down to a “half dozen” finalists who will soon be scheduled for interviews. A panel advising Colburn on the hiring decision is “setting up the questions” and preparing for the interviews now, he says. “Hiring a HR specialist (for the city) was a first priority, and second was hiring an assistant finance director,” he says of the prolonged process. “But we’re moving forward.”

Meanwhile, “discussions” with TCPD Captain Mike Ayling – who’s been on paid administrative leave since April for his handling of the case of former city manager Jered Ottenwess – are still ongoing, says Colburn. The city manager gave commissioners a closed-session update last week on the results of a third-party investigation into city staff’s role in the case. Before the board went into closed session, Colburn noted he had a potential action item he wanted commissioners to consider, and also mentioned potential financial liability for the city as a reason he was requesting a closed session.

Because Colburn has autonomous power to hire and fire city staff, the only action item likely to require commission review would be a financial buyout that exceeds Colburn’s spending authority. Colburn has declined to comment on Ayling’s future until the “two-sided dialogue with Ayling and his (union) representatives" is complete.