After City Council approved the $60 million public safety improvement project on Monday night, the Lubbock Police Department has been fine tuning how the new police network will operate.
Chief of Police Greg Stevens said the new facilities and updates to headquarters are much needed and an important part of police work. But the department is hoping the project won’t just improve efficiency but better connect police officers to the people in the Lubbock community. Their first goal is to become more accessible to the community.
“When we do this project, we’ll divide out and have one police station serving roughly 80 to 90 thousand people,” said Police Chief Greg Stevens. “We’ll be able to tackle the individual problems that many of our communities face at a much more manageable level.”
Chief Greg Stevens said the current police headquarters aren’t fully functional due to wasted space and lack of efficient work flow. But the biggest problem is there is no public access to officers.
“What we lack right now is a real opportunity to go out and meet people on their terms and in their area,” Stevens said. “We too often require people to come meet us instead so that will be changing with this project.”
The initiative is called community policing, which means officers will be assigned a substation and area of the the city to focus on.
“When you’re talking about a city that covers well over 135 square miles, it’s important to go out and be a stakeholder in the individual areas,” Stevens said.
One of the top priorities of the project is getting the police department involved with the community.
“One of the expectations is that they know personally the school principals, the business owners, the church leaders. All the folks that live and work in those areas,” Stevens explained.
Each substation will have it’s own Deputy Chief who is charge of the substation. Property crimes and smaller crimes will run though the substations whereas larger more serious crimes will be handled with investigators stationed at Police Headquarters.
City Council voted to fund this project through bonds which will cause an increase in property taxes. It’s estimated an average household in Lubbock will spend an extra $42 in property taxes yearly.
