Petaluma Police Chief’s mission: Reduce crime, engage public

It’s been more than a year since Ken Savano shed the “interim” status and became Petaluma’s official Chief of Police.|

It’s been more than a year since Ken Savano shed the “interim” status and became Petaluma’s official Chief of Police after Patrick Williams retired in 2016.

His message to the department has been simple: reduce crime, increase traffic safety and engage the public.

The Argus-Courier sat down with Savano last week to find out how he’s implementing that vision in his second year, and how he’s handling the many challenges facing police departments these days.

These are highlights of the interview.

Q: How would you describe the first year-and-a-half, in terms of things you’ve learned or stuff you’re proud of in that time?

Savano: “We’re proud all the time of the work our staff is doing. We’ve had some great cases and some great police work. The community engagement continues to be strong. Our only limitation, really, is having sufficient resources to do even more. We regret and are sad that we don’t have resources to put officers in schools.

The opioid epidemic right now, we’re disappointed that we don’t have resources to dedicate to full-time narcotics investigations. There’s a lot of things we could be doing differently. We have two full-time officers dedicated to homelessness and mental health and substance abuse. That’s just not enough.

We are proud of the work our staff is doing with the limited resources that we have. We’re just frustrated because we know we could be doing more. In our organization, our size, serving a population this size, a lot of departments have one person one particular job in the organization. We have managers and supervisors who have multiple jobs. We’re asking a lot of our staff. Even our patrol officers.

We try to create enough time for them to be proactive and also reactive and get their work done, but we’ve been as low as six percent or nine percent available time an hour. That’s like four minutes or six minutes. How do you prevent or deter crime in a town when you only get six minutes to walk your beat, ride a bicycle, get out and talk to your neighborhood.

Every time you get out of your car to do that, you get sent on another call. That’s challenging. … I would love to have more resources to do more, but we have received tremendous support from the community, from City Hall, from our elected officials. We just want everyone to know and we’re thankful to know everyone realizes it’s not just the police department’s responsibility to police the community. We all kind of have a responsibility in that.”

Q: The perception of police, there is a connotation that is negative for a lot people. How do officers deal with that? How do you manage that perception knowing people might be a little more cynical or a little more reluctant to engage or interact?

Savano: “I think, for us, a lot of times the public speaks for us because of the relationship we have. Sometimes the critics will come out and want to be critical of whatever action we took or whatever decision we made, we find that – at least on social media and even in public meetings – the public, those people that have a relationship with us … they’ll actually stand up and share their perspective that helps the other person realize maybe they don’t have all the information.

On social media, we had a recent contact with a gentlemen and he thought it was racially-motivated … When we finally put out our version of the story, he acknowledged it was true and then said that he didn’t mean our officer was racist, this, that and the other, but there was implicit bias all over. So the conversation changed directions and left us out of it.

So what do we tell our officers? We tell them to treat people like the way we just talked about, to do their very best and our work product and quality of our people will speak for itself. Recognize that what’s being reported or being posted online, they don’t always have all the information.”

Q: How important is it for officers to have diverse relationships with different minority groups to avoid implicit bias? Is the department making efforts to correct those things?

Savano: Absolutely. All of our staff has received implicit bias training. Part of our service to the community is to engage the public – that means everyone. We’re not just deciding to go to coffee houses or just have town hall meetings on a school campus. We’re actually trying to create as many opportunities as possible to engage those we serve. … We’re at the table. We have to be. We encourage participation by our staff in different organizations in the community and that allows us to meet different people and hear different perspectives. There isn’t an invitation we’ll turn down to sit with anyone or meet with anyone.

Q: Being a police officer is one of the most taxing jobs within a community. How do officers manage the toll of the job itself?

Savano: It’s a great question. It’s a complicated one, but it’s an easy one to answer. Everybody’s different. So we do a lot of peer support and wellness and safety training. A lot of what we do as a profession today we didn’t do so well years ago. That’s why the suicide rates were so high in law enforcement. And just because we do all that now doesn’t mean we’re magically better.

We had that double fatal rollover in the river a year-and-a-half ago now … and we had maybe seven or eight officers in the water. We got the call maybe 10 minutes after it went in the water which is an awful delay. Those girls didn’t stand a chance unfortunately … You had police officers in the frigid, cold water. They can’t stand. They can’t move the car. They can’t get the windows open. They’re just frantically trying to save these two girls.

A lot of them are parents. They have children that are that age. But ironically, the one that doesn’t have children, is so upset and affected by that event that he ended up medically retiring. The sight of his uniform, getting on his bike – he just couldn’t handle it. He was out for a year, lots of treatment, but he just couldn’t come back. This was a former marine. He’s not just some guy that wasn’t suited for the job. That’s one example where the toll is tremendous.

This officer-involved shooting we just had, I was there moments after the shooting and looked my staff in the eye, and told them I was glad they’re safe, checked in to see how they’re doing, and there’s this fear in their eyes. One of them feels like the suspect shot at him or there was a bullet that went by.

For an hour and 50 minutes, they’re at the ready trying to deescalate it, praying that this guy will drop the gun and give up peacefully. Imagine that, knowing that if this guy even reached for the gun they could’ve used deadly force, and they waited. They put themselves in harm’s way for an hour and 50 minutes hoping that he wouldn’t shoot out and hit them. That’s a tough place to be.

Then you worry about his family and what he’s going through and worried about the media and the public perception. You worry about your own family and what that’s going to do. Thankfully the community has been … very supportive.

But a lot of that, there’s a fact pattern that’s easier to process, but at the same time, I think it’s a byproduct of the relationship-building we’re doing in this community. We value life. It doesn’t matter if you’re a suspect; it doesn’t matter if you’re an officer. The loss of any life is tragic and our staff is trying to preserve life as much as possible and use deadly force only when absolutely necessary. Sometimes that brings tremendous risk of not going home to their (families).

Yes, it takes a toll … We go to things when people are just having an absolute crisis, the worst things have happened, and we’re expected to console and be a social worker and bring peace and safety and all these things.

Then we have to leave that call and go to the next one … We encourage health and wellness and having something to do outside of work, whether it’s go to a sports game, go up in the mountains and hang out in a cabin, go fly fishing or backpacking. You’ve got to have something to relieve that stress otherwise it will just consume you and sometimes break you. It’s very real.”

(Contact News Editor Yousef Baig at yousef.baig@arguscourier.com or 776-8461, and on Twitter @YousefBaig.)

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