Pueblo Police Department seeks to add community service officers

The Pueblo Police Department plans to add four full-time community service officers to handle lower-level tasks in order to free up sworn police officers to focus on more serious calls, Pueblo Police Chief Steven "Chris" Noeller told City Council Monday.

More than 19,000 hours were spent by police officers handling nonemergency or lower priority calls from December 2020 to December 2021, Noeller said.

Adding new community service officers to department staff would alleviate much of that workload and allow sworn officers to turn their focus back to higher priority situations.

"The idea of bringing in non-sworn members to handle these types of calls would substantially free up our sworn members to respond more quickly to more violent calls that require a quicker response and do require a sworn member to make an arrest or something of that nature," Noeller said.

Community service officers will not be sworn-in and will not have arrest powers. Instead, their civilian duties will focus primarily on evidence collection, case follow-ups where no suspect is present, abandoned vehicle complaints, traffic hazards and report writing and documentation.

Community service officers would receive about five weeks of training in a police academy setting where they'd learn proper procedures, evidence handling, driving and self-defense tactics before spending about a month on the streets with sworn patrolmen who would teach them how to handle lower priority calls, Noeller said.

If the program grows, Noeller intends to have former or current community service officers train new ones, which also would free up sworn officers, he said.

"The primary benefit of this program would be it would allow us to free up our patrol officers from handling calls that they don't necessarily have to be there for so we can increase community-oriented policing, we can lower our response times, we can start doing a lot of the things that we historically were doing with a larger number of patrol officers," he said.

The non-sworn staff would have different uniforms and vehicles to distinguish them from police officers when interacting with the public. They would, however, wear body cameras like their sworn-officer counterparts.

They will most likely be weaponless on the job, Noeller said, with the possible exception of mace for self-defense.

Trending: Pueblo Fire Chief proposes rebuilding 3 fire stations, adding one on west side

The Colorado Springs Police Department started a community service officer program in 2010. It has served as a blueprint for Pueblo's program, Noeller said.

"A lot of our training that we're doing is based on what they've done, identifying issues that they've dealt with," he said.

"The idea here is, 'Why recreate the wheel when someone's already done it?' I mean, we certainly want to put the Pueblo spin on it because what every community needs is slightly different but we're looking to learn lessons from those other agencies."

Like other government entities in Pueblo, the police department has had trouble recruiting officers to fill 22 vacancies. Noeller hopes that adding community service officers will become an avenue to recruit future patrolmen.

In addition to being a promotional opportunity for employees working in other parts of city government, it also creates new possibilities for young people who have graduated high school and are interested in law enforcement careers, but can't legally become a police officer until they turn 21.

"I think it's possible that we could get applications from that age group, maybe 18 plus, to do this job," Noeller said. "They can decide without jumping in the pool up to their neck whether law enforcement is the career for them. They can get a little bit of a taste of it."

Council will vote to approve the additional staff during a public hearing on Monday. Noeller said he hopes to begin the hiring process around mid-July.

The addition of all four full-time community service officers would cost an estimated $312,278 for the upcoming year.

Trending: Councilor claims in police report that Pueblo City Attorney Kogovsek was 'threatening'

Contact Chieftain reporter Lacey Latch at llatch@gannett.com or on social media @laceylatch.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Pueblo police look to hire four full-time community service officers