Lubbock Police Department Tour by Chief Stevens

[Music] you guys know this you come in here you see that it's a fortress I mean you come in here and you've got one little small area you come in the public doors and then you walk in your face to meet a little ball proof glass and and we're you've got a balance a welcoming environment that the public feels welcomed to come into but but yet the officers are still safe to do their job in it and we want to make sure that we have that that balance done we don't have it right now no one feels welcome coming in the officers are very safe but it's a we want to make sure that we have a place where they can come to work be safe the public that is here as a witness or a victim or safe as well but yet you walk into you don't feel like that you just walked into a wall of people where you're where you're not going to be listened to and so we don't have that right now and each one of these facilities will have a much more a much more warm environment if you will if you will a place where people can come in in for the life that hey this is my this is my police department in there they're happy to see more in the auditorium which at one time was the City Council Chambers because this was originally sitting on a municipal square and so we're gonna go from there every walk - we're gonna take the the whole police department or the area that sits over here was remodel it's the one of the last areas be remodeled through the early 2000s for my offices and where the crimes against personnel homicide detectives are housed so we're gonna go to a few areas on the second floor and we'll make our way down to one part of the basement we'll go out to dispatch and it will make a right back up to the first or patrols elevators they don't make par for these elevators anymore and so we're not going to ride in those because that could unnecessarily prolong the trip laboratories over there we do all of our own in-house stuff other than drug testing or DNA testing it's it's can't expand any further that's as big as it's going to get our family crimes area in this this has been remodeled a number of different times throughout the years we'll make our way around the around the grounds wait here so the ceiling tiles as you look up these are all asbestos tiles and we can't move those or or make any alterations or without doing abatement to those [Music] all of these detectives offices right here these these are all and by our family crimes people right here both of these guys are here you'll see these walls were all installed sometime I want to say back in around the mid to late 80s maybe in the early 90s or so when these were these were put in through here thinking without disturbing any of the ceiling tiles [Music] a couple things that will show you in here that kind of dates an age ages the building since there's no solid walls as I've talked about a moment ago the electrical outlets come out of the floor and you can see those if you want to take a film goes right there and that's what we're gonna point out the walls that you have in this office area because they're not other now there are permanent fixture walls they are add in walls if you will an honest own portable wall it's not like a cubicle or a modern day type office complex they're just walls that were put in to make office space I have a much larger area so a little bit get electricity in here was to come through the floor like this and you can see that the date of when that was actually done and just just by the [Music] well notice two so talking about earlier that this was at one time four different buildings which initially comprised of the original and I'm talking almost a hundred years ago the original fire and police stations on the west side of the complex and then again City Hall and other buildings which was four original buildings they were joined into one municipal square when the second floor was added and you can see where that basically the buildings were a little bit different type that I believe and you can see the floor kind of creates that a bit of a sloping pattern right there and you're stuck with having to run the wires wherever you can find a spot to the poster [Music] okay you going back through here this is where our Guinness is they're all actually working right now but this is where our property some of our property crime section one of the challenges that we face is over time as the building has been remodeled from time to time we would take a unit and move in somewhere we model that area move in in different units and from where that unit came would remodel that area and then move someone in and so a bit of a if you will a clam shell game that we've had to play over the years so it's very disjointed and not a lot not a lot of operational flow [Music] a lot of the tiles you have up here again these are all asbestos tiles and and again so no remodeling beyond just paint on the walls can be done through here and so you can see this horse great quarters back here this is going focus to pulsing while stuff on the desk but this is how many detectives that we basically fit into this misgiven area where when I was over here as a young detective there were two or maybe three people in this office at the most this is this was at one time actually a polygraph room years and years ago you see the one-way glass and the soundproofing on the wall so many years ago this was a polygraph room when I was over here in the 90s we just had a refrigerator and some snacks in here because of the size of it how small it is but I wore a point now where we put a detective in here and so detective anguish calls this home if you will and happy to have his own office compared to the other ones that are all bunking up with people I guess that's true [Music] what you can see so from you clearly you can see that side of the building is where a lot of remodeling has been done over the years now you're at the back of the building kind of the that was the face of it now now we're at the rear of it where we don't do nearly the level of remodeling because this is all unusable space and so when you hear that overall the building has a hundred thousand square feet 62,000 square feet or whatever it is much of that is not usable and I'll show watch me go back into what is beyond gentle sales cost you you'll see a lot of this stuff on the side this is all this paint everything is all it's all hot press bestest we encourage people not to lick the walls and it be very careful as you walk through but it's not gonna hurt you if you're just walking through we're still upstairs and these cells right here we're at one time group cells so you can walk around take a look at them we use them for some storage right now and when we leave here we'll go down into what was the old gel and the significance here is while two-thirds of this building is allocated for the police department this is a very large chunk that we can't use because we can't remodel these cells aside from the asbestos or we can't do anything with those I mean there's nothing that we can do to make these you for the space so we've got some files that we store in here these are ones that we keep on a little bit of a short-term basis but that we keep in that we will occasionally come back in and use and get to this is one of one of two group cells that were up on the second floor see this catwalk around it [Music] it's all allocated for us none of which is usable this is where we would place female arrestees we're back in this this hallway right here we have some stuff stored water right right the type of a way of doing things so if a unit finds a new area the third that they go into they'll then come to me and say hey can we have that office so I'll they've probably been into it for a week or so and I say sure if you clean it up enough and you want to put your things in there go ahead because that's just the way it works when we're out of space canine offices our canine training area that we have so let's have to keep that in there this was the old patrol administration side again rhythm we're at a point right now where we just don't want to put any any future monies into this building and so k9 is come back here and put their own you know their own things that our own training equipment back here and now they used used this area and this is the condition that was left in when patrol moved over to the other side of the building after renovation in the early 2000s this is actually the the previous or well I guess the current bicycle room there's some more back that way and again with the squatter's rights protocol they've found a new area and I'll take take that to you a little risk involved in that because it floods down in the basement but I've you know we've told them hey if you want to move move that stuff somewhere else wherever you can find a spot you're welcome to it but I'll show you where that newer he is but this so because there are a room right here they don't have any room but I don't have anywhere else to put them I don't have an office where I could say you know this is where you're going to be so look they make it look the best they can this area Plus once a year sometimes twice a year significant rainfall will get flooding down here and so we have to keep things off the floor but we mainly use this area for her record storage and when I was a young officer this was where the briefing room was and I'll show you that area [Music] this is where all of our basically old police reports the hard copies or handwritten versions that we have to store we keep down here because we've got to keep them you know secured and locked up this is the best we can do right now we have them raised up off the floor a little bit to try to guard against flooding but they need to be in a better area you can see this bugs here unfortunately got done wet at one time this room floods the least from where you can again we spray we have it it's a it's a uphill battle with the with the pest problems if you see a mouse run by just be still he will bother you but that happened that that that's not unusual what's the one kind of case the one kind of report that we can never get rid of you're on the right track smarter Parker cases right so we refer to this as the murderer so all of our old cases every every every police report every not the evidence it's stored in the property room but all of the old reports and documents and everything from from not this cold cases but all of the solved murders every every homicide that's happened we keep those documents in here and so as important as these are their own tables and they're up off the floor we can't let anything happen to these you know to these these evidentiary documents they need to be in a better you know a better place that an old locker room is what you're in right now this is you know back long before the days of complete car program this is where the officer were to show up every day and they would put on uniforms and and turn out into the briefing room but this is where they're stored because this is the area that we have available we're trying to make the best use of space that we can and these these data all the way back I mean you know there's cases back into the 70s back into the 60s they're all all in this room right here this is the new bike room they're debating on taking but they know they can see hey there's a risk by putting bicycles back here but they want the space and so kind of ice waters rights they get it if they wanted and they're looking at moving the bicycle operations down here I think they're probably going to store most stuff up there they know if they give that room up and someone else gets it they lose it sort of how it works around here when you're in limited [Music] and it's working cleaned up one of the weavers you know two three years ago it was full old equipment trash just crack this is pretty decent remember and we cleaned it up got all that stuff out of here I had some some pretty good keepsakes and we've stored some of those things but it was mainly all things that we need to get rid of what's up sort of significant from the jail so we're right underneath the jail right now these are the sewage pipes from the jail and so it was open and inmates would shove things down the toilets or whatever this is where they had to come to take the pops of particles things out again an unusable area of course we be able to do anything with this area down here but the visited this is the original shooting range I don't know [Music] so right here you can see where the foundation is cracking and sinking in and the ceiling height there's nothing that can be done they're remediated and water comes in it goes down into the basement dispatch is right there so phone line sort of a matter of time we're waiting to see how bad that's gonna be we don't really know yet to be honest it's one of the show you another one we get back up and that's one of those most significant structural issues that we're facing right now it's sort of a a serious problem we don't know it's serious don't know how serious but there's nothing we can do about it right now [Music] this is the original summer the original I suppose but at least in my time this is the Emergency Operations Center however we rarely ever use it it's you can see that it's quite congested in here to try to fit enough people in here to be effective there's the airflow is terrible we have a auxilary air conditioner and so what we do now is actually I use a room at the fire department and they're currently building the very reason they're building a new emergency operation center out by fire administration is because this room is is simply not not adequate for what we need to fit the number of people and to really work effectively so more or less this one becomes sort of a redundant room for that or a backup Emergency Operations Center but it's and I don't want to talk a lot in there because they're they're working they're dispatching calls answering 911 one right now and so I'll say a couple of words out here and then won't go in there we're gonna walk behind the two primary dispatch channels we need to have three primary just best channels and we're looking with this project to break into three different sub substation areas three different patrol divisions if you will they're fully staffed right now and they can't hire any more put any more people in until they have more room and so you can see by the structure of this it's it's really going to be impossible to try to take that wall out and move into so they're landlocked this is as much room as they're going to have and and this is all over you would have here to do emergency operations [Music] and then behind that is his secondary channels where they check Lawrence or they call from Tokyo so they they ask for additional information things like that and then 911 operators are against that all night little uncle's coming in this room and then farmed out whether you eat EMS or fire or anything [Music] [Music] the new patrol administration saw the panelled area back there they moved from there over to here this was remodeled in the orchard this is this in one of those small areas that only carries an officer cavitus it and round reports for the entire city [Music] for all 200 well actually it's closer to 300 people that are assigned to the patrol division now that includes the assistant chief all the captains traffic and and all of that they have a little over 200 public 2:30 or so that actually are assigned to patrol duties including sergeants and the supervisors but your patrols are so all of those officers this is the one room in the entire city that they operate out this is it and and so the whole idea here is we have one police one police station of serving 250,000 people and and that's that's where a lot of the inefficiency comes from and the the fact that we don't have much of a personal relationship out in the communities and what we're looking at is going to substation to where you'll have one police station serving about 80,000 people population to more effectively get out into the community and have a much more interpersonal relationship if you will out into the individual in the analogy of how to make your pizza when you call it when you call up to order a pizza right there's the answer the phone and right there is is the dope so cuz it's May and it goes next and then put the sauce and right there's the cheese after that's the top and it goes through and it gets the oven and it goes through it comes out of the oven this is conveyor belt type process it's called it's it's it's a method of operations it's a an Operations standpoint we don't have that we lack that assembly line process if you will sometimes when someone asked me about the status of a report it I mean you know if you'd count your steps I get my steps in for the day looking for that thing because it can go all across this building again we told you upstairs when we look through I've got property crimes in three different locations I've got depending on whether or not you if you if the the crime that we're investigating has to deal with is there a person that's a victim or is a piece of property that's objective listen turdus and we want to bring together a very geographic approach so that you know that you have you know you can be your address and I can find that report I can find those those all the individuals that have touched that a lot quicker a lot more efficiency efficiently and and we want to set up every company every organization follows that kind of premise and and when we can start doing that the more efficient we're going to be right now I can't do that because I can't join those people together because I either have an area that's not that is not remodeled in the middle that's a dead space or I've got another unit right between them and and so we've got to jump over each other yet to try to get those things done [Music] you

Channel: Lubbock Avalanche-Journal - A-J Media

Views: 5,267

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Id: _ZObKyZWlQU

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 08 2017