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 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.
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