For the past few years, Julie Cleveland has worked as a police service technician at Vancouver Police Department’s West Precinct, taking citizen’s reports over the phone and from people who walk in.
The past few weeks, however, she’s taken her job on the road — responding to low-level crimes and interacting with people out in the community.
“It’s different, taking a report out in the field,” Cleveland said. “You can visualize the situation when you do it over the phone, but you leave out details you see when you’re there.”
Cleveland’s is one of four new positions at the police agency, called field police service technicians, or field PSTs. She still takes the same kinds of reports that she did before, but rather than being separated by a partition or a phone line, she goes to the crime scene.
“I think it enhances our service to the community,” Vancouver Police Chief James McElvain said. “It’s more personalized. (Citizens) have an actual person that is showing up.”
Vancouver police is only a few weeks into having field PSTs on patrol, so Cleveland and her colleagues are still getting accustomed to going into people’s homes, driving a vehicle with a mounted computer and wearing a ballistics vest. They aren’t officers, so they don’t carry a gun and they can’t make arrests or write citations. That means, McElvain said, any calls for service that have suspect information are diverted to an officer.
Police service technicians can, however, take reports of burglaries and car break-ins reported after the fact and hit-and-runs that didn’t result in any injuries. Cleveland and other field PSTs can also assist at scenes of crimes by logging evidence and itemizing found stolen property. They can even take the steps to find and contact the stolen property’s rightful owner.
All of it, Cleveland said, is the tedious part of police work.
“It just takes time,” she said.
For example, when she’s not responding to a call for service, Cleveland deals with reports of abandoned vehicles. She drives to where they’re sitting and marks the vehicle as being abandoned, allowing the owner 24 hours to move it. If by the next day the vehicle hasn’t been moved, Cleveland will wait the 20 minutes to an hour it takes to get a tow truck to respond to the scene.
“I was concerned there would be push-back from the officers,” she said. “We’re taking their jobs.”
Cleveland said she now sees her role as that of support to the law enforcement patrolling the streets.
“It helps them,” she said. “It frees up time for them to do real police work.”
The idea of putting non-sworn, unarmed police employees in the field isn’t a new one — agencies throughout the country have done something similar for years using various titles for the positions. Vancouver police started looking into the idea prior to the economic downturn, McElvain said, but only recently got around to establishing a formal protocol and training program.
“Now we have the staffing to be able to support it,” McElvain said.
The field PSTs are among the 61 new positions that will be added to the department by 2020 as part of a funding package approved by city councilors earlier this year.
McElvain said there are two working in the field now and two more in training. He hopes to add a fifth toward the end of the year.
One of the benefits of the addition, McElvain pointed out, is that the police service technicians are now working on Saturday and Sunday.
Prior to this, patrol officers working on the weekend who were busy during their shift could hold lower-level calls for service for police service technicians, who previously worked normal business hours.
“Now those calls that would have waited until Monday morning are now being addressed on the weekend as well,” McElvain said. “We have the additional resources to send them out sooner.”
