Chief looks to fill open positions with exceptional officers

Chief looks to fill open positions with exceptional officers

By David Ryan Palmer

Associate Editor

Three positions are still open at the McNeese Police Department, but filling those boots is more involved than signing an application and answering a few questions.

You have to be willing to engage, be a great communicator, and strangely enough, be good at just about everything.

“You’ve got to be better, and have a wider range of ability, than in traditional city or sheriff’s office policing,” McNeese Police Chief Robert Spinks said. 

The Process

Spinks’ office has been marketing two police officer positions and a dispatch position. 

“We’re trying to get the officers hired, because the police academy is having their next training session in April,” Spinks said.

“Some of the applicants are going to be individuals who are already post-certified,” – meaning have already gone through academy training for police work – “and some are going to be coming from higher education, and we’ll have to send them off to the police academy,” Spinks continued.

Being interested in being a police officer is only the first step in a process that leaves other job applicant procedures in the dust.  Spinks said that there’s a written test, an essay, an interview, and a huge number of questions to answer.

“They’ll take the paper part of their psychological evaluation, which is 455 questions,” he said.

Then Spinks’ office gets to work.  “We’ll take all those scores, reshuffle the deck, see who’s there, and then we’ll start doing background investigations, polygraphs, drug testing.  We’ll make a couple of job offers, if we have any quality candidates,” he said.

Those who are not post-certified will then have to go back to school.  “If you go to the Police Academy, you have to take a physical ability test.  It’s a mile and a half run, it’s a 300-yard dash, sit ups and pushups, based on your age,” he said.

“If you have to go the Police Academy, you’ll be starting around April 10 or so, and it lasts for 10 weeks.”

Only then will you be able to wear the black uniform, cruise around campus in a police car, and endeavor to keep campus safe.  However, that doesn’t mean you’re not done with testing.

“Upon graduation, they would start with us and go through a structured training officer program of about 12 weeks before we can trust them to be by themselves,” Spinks said.

The Job

Spinks said that being a McNeese Police officer, being a community police officer, is different, more varied than other policing jobs.  It’s not only an authority figure, but also a teacher, and sometimes a counselor, where in say the Sheriff’s Office or the city police, you would have a much more narrow focus.

“Those are large departments.  You have a very structured assignment.  If you’re working patrol for the Sheriff’s Office or for the city, that’s all you do.  You go find bad guys, deal with the forces of evil, write tickets and put people in jail.  If you’re a detective, you go out detecting,” he said.

“With us, it’s a little bit different.  Not only do university police officers need to be really good generalists, but you have to look at the environment that you’re in.  We’re in an educational institution, so honestly your communication skills have to be at a much higher level.”

Lieutenant Mike Powell is brand new to the McNeese Police Department, though not to policing.  He’s Spinks’ right hand man, and exactly the kind of officer that the Chief hopes will fill the vacant positions. 

“My background has been almost 30 years in municipal police work.  You know, you try the community-policing thing, but you have so many other calls for service that you really don’t get to have that intimate one-on-one interaction with people,” Powell said.

At McNeese, however, Powell is able to engage with the people he protects better than he ever could.

“I’ll take the ATV over, and just park it somewhere, and walk around campus.  I’ll say hi to people, ask how they’re doing,” he said.

At first, people were a bit standoffish.  “Used to be, they’d just nod, or say hi, but more and more people are stopping and talking.  I’m hoping that eventually, if they have questions, they’ll feel okay to come up and talk to me, if they have concerns, they can just walk up and ask me about them,” he said.

“It’s something that I want to do, and it’s something that I want to have our officers do more.”

Spinks and Powell both hope that, by hiring more officers, the department will be able to engage with students and faculty even more, and to have specialized training that makes sense on a college campus.

“One of our goals is to have 100 percent of our staff trained in crisis intervention training,” Spinks said.

“If you look at other police departments, that’s a specialized function for a small number of people.  To me, that’s an expectation for everybody here who has a gun.  There are some areas where we should simply be subject matter experts.”