The Chula Vista Police Department’s five-year plan includes a culture change, fully staffed officers, and enforcing partnerships throughout the community.
The department’s 79-page, five-year strategic plan published last December outlines goals in moving the agency forward through 2019.
This is the third strategic plan compiled by the Police Department, and the most detailed and researched, said Police Capt. Lon Turner.
“This one is a really good encapsulating snapshot of what 2014 looked like for us and what we have seen for issues that are emerging for the next five years,” Turner said.
“I think it’s a good road map for the future.”
Three separate initiatives are at the core of the plan: people, partnerships and processes.
People focuses on the members of the police staff, and the work involved to recruit, retain and develop the staff to carry out the intent of the department’s plan for the future.
The priorities for this initiative are to work to create and sustain succession planning to prepare staff to assume positions of greater responsibility.
Turner said the plan includes smart policing initiatives to identify when officers might be retiring from the organization or moving to other areas within the organization, and determine how that demand will be impacted by the recruitment and retention efforts.
Turner said, for example, if they know that in any given year they will lose officers, then they probably need to get the appropriate number of recruits into the academy for the following year.
Recruits take a long time to hire, Turner said. Turner said it is important to help with forecasting efforts because sometimes a recruit won’t see action on the police force for 14 to 16 months.
“While we can moderately forecast, we can’t very accurately forecast what we think our vacancies will be for the future,” Turner said.
Partnerships aim at sustaining and developing relationships with other city departments and those throughout the community.
The goal for the partnerships initiative is to develop and maintain partnerships that are intended to enhance the levels of trust and cooperation with the community and add to the transparency of the department’s work.
Turner said CVPD would like to strengthen the department’s ties between the Chula Vista Elementary School District and the Sweetwater Union High School District because communication among the department and school districts has not been as effective as years past.
The processes portion articulates ways in which excellence in policing is assessed, evaluated and measured.
The goal in this area is to address issues before they become serious crime or disorder issues in the community. This strategic plan will also guide the agency’s acquisition and use of technologies to enhance the Police Department’s work to combat crime.
Turner said the key to this strategic plan was making it scenario-based so it can adapt to the way the economy and any predicted hard and soft trends shape up in the next five years.
“(The strategic plan is adaptable) because we know things can change down the road,” Turner said.
Hard trends include population changes while soft trends are the decriminalization of drug laws and the public’s attitude toward law enforcement.
Turner said the two biggest critical issues that CVPD has been facing is recruiting/retention and information technology.
The department is authorized for 225 officers but only employs 208. Turner said it’s been a struggle trying to fully staff the department with 17 additional officers.
Because of the city’s cuts the IT staff has been reduced, which results in loss of emails and servers crashing, which affects the day-to-day service of the department.
“We’re always in a battle to try and keep that number up in terms of recruitment,” he said.
Three captains are assigned to each initiative and they meet weekly to discuss how the goals are progressing.
CVPD hired Ernest Harrison consultants at $20,000 to help formulate the five-year plan.
Turner said the future for the department remains hopeful.
