While Poplar Bluff has seen exponential growth in recent years, its police department hasn’t kept pace, according to those who have watched both the positive and negative impacts of that.
With looming retirements, administrative staff are worried about how services could suffer in the future.
“The department should have grown. We should have increased our officers over the last 10 to 15 years, and we’ve actually shrunk,” said Capt. David Sutton, who oversees the department’s patrol division.
The department currently has 43 commissioned officers, where previously it had 46.
Three permanent positions in the patrol division, Sutton said, have been lost over the last decade because of budget cuts.
On top of that, several officers have left for other jobs.
“In the past 18 months, we saw a huge turnover we had not expected,” Sutton explained. “We lost seven people, including six young officers and one early retirement.
“They’re just going to other jobs and leaving the police profession entirely.”
Equal or better pay and less stress, according to city manager Matt Winters, are contributors to the departures.
“Now, we’re competing against retail stores to recruit one or two officers at a time,” Winters said. “When you’re competing against retailers when it comes to pay, it puts you in a bad place.”
Currently, Winters said, the base salary for a new officer is $41,646 and rises to $45,889 after one year.
Another factor, Police Chief Danny Whiteley said, is playing a role in the retention, and, worse, recruitment of new officers.
“In today’s times of the ‘defund the police’ movements, it’s getting very serious,” he said.
“There’s a whole lot less stressful jobs you can go get, making the same money or even more, than to come to work and wear a gun on your hip and worry about what kind of bad guys you’re going to be dealing with in the course of your day,” Winters added.
At the same time officers are leaving, recruiting new ones is becoming more and more difficult, and police academies struggle to fill available slots.
“We’re going to enter a period of time where we’re not going to be able to get enough good candidates to replace the officers that are leaving,” Sutton warned.
And that brings up another problem. The department is facing the pending retirements of up to 15 of its longest-tenured staff in the patrol, investigations and administration divisions.
“We’ve seen this coming for a long time, and we have been anticipating over the next five to eight years, we’ve got a large percentage of the department that is going to retire in short order,” Sutton said.
“We are looking at losing people earlier to early retirement. It’s something we didn’t think about before,” Sutton added. “Everybody worked until they were 55, but because of the job market the way it is and the environment in law enforcement the way it is, it’s harder and harder to keep people.”
The expected retirements, Sutton explained, make up the top third of the department’s experience, with a total estimated service time at around 394 years.
“The officers retiring are the most experienced, but they also make up a large part of our supervision and administration and investigation unit,” he said.
That has him worried about a future department without enough training and experience.
“Even a really good, young officer doesn’t bring the same qualities to the table as somebody that’s been doing it for a quarter-century,” said Sutton, who’s been at the police department for 27 years and was a Butler County Sheriff’s Department deputy before that. “We’re hiring officers that were born after I started here. The life experience and the things you’re exposed to here build skills and intuition.
“The younger officers will have to develop that. There’s an art to it you can’t teach in the academy.”
Real-world field experience, Whiteley added, is critical, and he offered an analogy.
“If you have a very low-time pilot that has all the training, but does not have the hours to be as efficient as possible and as safe as possible, it’s kind of like police officers,” Whiteley explained. “They have to be on duty for a number of years to become acclimated to what goes on in the law enforcement world.”
New officers need to be hired now as the retirement clock is ticking, both Sutton and Whiteley said.
“It takes three months to hire somebody after background checks, medical checks and other things … then another three months of field training” before a new officer is allowed to work by themselves, explained Sutton. “It’ll take four or five years before they’re a fully-contributing officer.
“It’s not like other careers where once you learn the skills, you’re doing the same work as a guy that’s been there for 10 years. It’s in progressive degrees, and the longer a person is here, the better the contribution they make.”
The police department has made internal changes, and the city council has considered more, to make the job more attractive to potential recruits and transfers from other departments.
“The 12-hour shifts have been a really good recruiting tool,” Sutton said. “It made a big difference with the young officers being able to have a three-day weekend every other weekend.”
Other recent changes include the relaxation of the department’s visible tattoos policy and the Poplar Bluff City Council’s employment residency requirements.
“We have looked at the potential for paying for or reimbursing candidates to go through the law enforcement academies,” added Winters.
Sutton also would like to see the reinstatement of insurance benefits for family members.
“I think that’s going to be a necessary thing in the future,” he said.
The bottom line, Winters said, is more money is needed, not only for the police department but the fire department as well, and that can only come through the passage of a use tax, which citizens have voted down several times already.
“Our budget is tight every year, and it’s hard to make those adjustments. It’s all about the money,” he said. “If the use tax ever passes, and maybe even before that, I think we’ll look at where our pay scale is compared to other police departments across the state in similar-sized communities.”
“I think at some point the taxpayers are going to have to allow the council to give a raise to law enforcement,” Sutton said. “Otherwise, the pool of qualified applicants will keep dwindling for some time.”
The people of Poplar Bluff “have consistently voted down the use tax, so maybe it is time for them to say what they are willing to pay. How would they be willing to fund services,” Sutton added.
Potential grows for services to be reduced in the future without an increase in funding through a use tax.
In the short-term, Sutton predicted, there could be a significant increase in the amount of overtime worked, which already was a problem in 2021.
The department has been averaging nearly 40,000 calls for service annually, an increase of 36% since 2005. The average time on location at each one has been 19 minutes.
If a lack of funding persists, “I could see a time when you’d have to scale back on services, like fewer officers on duty, an increase in response times and a decrease in the amount of time on calls,” Sutton said.
Average police response time to calls in 2021 was about two and a half minutes, Winters stated, and that’s with four officers on the road at one time.
“To get any less (officers) than that is scary and something we don’t want to see happen,” he said.
Reports could be turned in and never followed up on, and responses to accidents without injuries could be culled, but those changes would just scratch the surface, Sutton believes.
“I can very easily see the crime rate increasing, with the community less safe than it is now. And I can see insurance rates going up,” he said.
“Poplar Bluff is a growing, thriving community, and we’re going to have to have some more officers or the public and/or the department is going to suffer consequences for maybe having only four officers on the job late at night,” Whiteley insisted.
That thought doesn’t sit well with Winters.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth with new manufacturers coming to town and new retailers inquiring on a regular basis,” Winters said. “When Interstate 57 gets done, I think that’s going to bring a whole new growth to Poplar Bluff.
“To think about any kind of reduction in public safety is not really an option. It’s a matter of at least how to maintain it, if not make it stronger.”
The responsibility, Sutton said, falls squarely on the shoulders of the citizens.
“For the most part, I think the people of Poplar Bluff and Butler County have been more supportive of their law enforcement than other communities have been,” Sutton said. “I’m cautiously optimistic the people will, at some point, decide what they want to do to keep a good police department, and I’d like to think it’s going to be in the next couple years.”