LITTLE ROCK — Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said a hiring campaign that will include a new assistant chief will present the department with an opportunity to reorganize and streamline several divisions.
Thomas said the new assistant chief, who will fill a vacancy, will take over a revamped patrol division andove r s e e a departmental shake-up that he said will provide clearer responsibilities and goals for the command staff and more responsive policing for residents.
A week after his senior assistant chief, Carlos Corbin, retired, Thomas said he is looking to fill the position as soon as the city’s Human Resources Department can start the application process, as part of a refinement of the state’s largest municipal police force.
“It’s too early to say exactly what” might emerge, said Thomas, adding that the reorganization could take a year or more to complete. “But inevitably you’ll see fewer divisions with broader responsibilities.”
The reorganization won’t be complete until the department’s manpower is increased. Thomas said he is looking to fill 54 vacancies and hire 12 additional officers. A recently passed city sales-tax increase is enabling the hiring.
“A lot of [these changes] are predicated on our ability to be fully staffed, which would give us a lot of flexibility to do what we’ve wanted to for years but never had the personnel,” Thomas said. “[Over the next year], we need to make sure we adapt and adjust because these situations are fluid and can change.”
At the beginning of the year, Thomas had three assistant chiefs. Now he has one.
Thomas said he’s not sure whether the department will need a third assistant chief. What he does want, he said, is to reshape and refine his department, mainly to have more clear responsibilities for a command staff that, either by design or personal action, has been accountable enough.
Still, having many divisions and too many division commanders leads to too many redundancies, Thomas said, and oftentimes leads to overlapping of responsibilities, which can lead to more bureaucracy.
“If you have multiple elements responsible for the same thing, it’s really difficult to hold one single person responsible for how we respond,” Thomas said. “You can assess from a broad perspective that people are successful at what they’re doing ... but you want something more definite [to measure them by].”
For example, if someone is burglarized, a burglary report is filed through the department’s patrol division. That burglary then goes to a different division in a different bureau and is assigned to a detective there.
Department spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said a move to expand the patrol division to include burglary detectives will streamline the process and provide a better service to citizens.
“In [that example], you have two different captains overseeing the operation,” Hastings said. “Sometimes resources from one division are not made [available to] the other division.”
Thomas said that reassigning units to different divisions or lumping divisions under different bureaus will give him the best system to evaluate the department’s performance.
“You would like to be able to assess the performance and product of command staff through something concrete,” Thomas said. “I don’t know of anything you could isolate better than crime and your response to it.”
Assistant Chief Eric Higgins commands five divisions, including the department’s detective and special operations divisions.
Acting assistant chief Capt. Wayne Bewley oversees four divisions, including the city’s three patrol and communications divisions.
Of those divisions, Thomas said, at least one, special operations, might be eliminated.
A grab bag of sorts, special operations contains nine units, including the department’s motorcycle officers, DWI task force and hit-andrun investigators, and has a total of 47 officers and 13 supervisors.
Thomas thinks that many of those units would be more effective and their leadership more accountable if they were folded into patrol divisions.
Noting what he calls the “natural linkage” between patrol cars and dispatchers, Thomas said the communications division, which before this week was in a different bureau, would likely remain under the new chief ’s bureau.
The new assistant chief, with more units and tools for patrol, will have to be more focused on the streets.
“[The community] is clear on the types of things of great concern ... that’s presence, visibility, traffic issues, response times,” Thomas said. “There will be a sense of ownership there, and that assistant chief will have to push [those changes] forward.”
Another possible shake-up will occur in the city’s investigative division, according to Thomas, who wants to focuson his department’s response to violent crime.
Of the division’s 50 detectives, 18 work property crimes, such as burglaries and auto thefts. Thomas said he thinks that detectives working those types of investigations would be better suited taking commands from the same assistant chief as the city’s patrol officers and burglary-prevention units.
Regarding the remaining violent-crime detectives, Thomas said, he wants to find ways to make their workmore proactive than reactive. With the addition of a fourth crime analyst, Thomas thinks that detectives will be able to isolate pockets and trends of violent crime as they canwith burglaries and other property crimes.
“Traditionally, we treat violent crime as less than predictable,” Thomas said. “But with the [data-gathering and mapping] tools at our disposal, I think we can look and see where it’s happening ... where it could happen.”
City Manager Bruce Moore said Thomas’ ideas are a step in the right direction and he believes that a more efficient department will yield results for residents.
“I think it’s a good move ...getting the detectives out to the various precincts to work with watch commanders and other parts of the patrol divisions,” Moore said. “It’s a move that will hopefully enhance our overall crime efforts.”
City Director Lance Hines said he hadn’t heard Thomas’ plans but trusts the chief’s judgment.
“He knows how to run the Police Department,” Hines said. “If he wants to be more efficient and streamlined ... I’m supportive in that effort.”
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola and several other directors did not return phone calls to discuss Thomas’ plans.
Little Rock’s Fraternal Order of Police president, detective Kevin Simpson, said his organization hadn’t been involved in Thomas’ plans.
“At the end, if something is done and we want to address it, we will,” Simpson said. “But nothing’s been done yet, so I can’t comment at this time.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/09/2011