The final Glass in the Morning interview is Deputy Mayor Mick Renneisen. Glass in the Afternoon debuts tomorrow from 3 to 6 on the BRAND NEW 98.7 News Sports Talk FM plus AM 1370 and wgclradio.com. Don’t worry, Mick is coming with us to afternoons!
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Hello,
First off, I watched the video of the Community Council where the police department spoke up and they were referring to Lafayette, Indiana, not West Lafayette, Indiana and Purdue. This leads me to believe that the Deputy Mayor may not have listened closely to the concerns of the department when they spoke up at the Community Council meeting.
In addition, I’m a little concerned with some of the Deputy Mayor’s comments regarding IUPD and that they should be counted as part of the police force here in Bloomington or students who live on campus should be excluded as part of Bloomington’s population and the people BPD services. First off, IUPD stays on campus and takes calls in and around the university. They do not service the rest of the city. The 12,000 students that live on campus, though, do leave campus for a variety of reasons. That being said, BPD officers respond to calls that involve students on-campus when they’re not on campus. Whether that be because they went to the store, got in an accident off campus, attended parties off campus, etc. In addition, I think it’s important that we also consider the amount of people that commute to Bloomington for work everyday. According to StatsIndiana (https://www.stats.indiana.edu/maptools/commuting-ACS.asp), approximately 10,000 people commute to Bloomington from outside counties. We also don’t consider the thousands of people who travel to Bloomington for IU sports or events. If we consider these details, I think we can still conclude that the Police Department is understaffed, and that without offering competitive salary benefits we will continously struggle to keep or attract qualified/ good officers and candidates.
Lastly, as someone who is close to a member of BPD, Neighborhood Resource Officers do not respond to many Welfare Checks. This article from Wisconsin sums it up pretty well (https://waow.com/news/2019/06/12/area-police-department-weighs-in-on-their-protocols-for-calls-to-welfare-checks/) when they say that “There’s always a danger with going into any kind of welfare check, and that’s why there’s always a minimum of two officers that go unless something else is known,”. My friend has cancelled many hangout sessions due to the status of Welfare Checks going sour. Neighborhood Resource Officers are not trained to the extent that BPD Officers are in that they are not equipped to handle situations that require deescalation or situations that can become potentially dangerous to not only the officers, but other peoples involved (such as domestic violence cases or cases that involve those with mental illness). I also don’t think that having Neighborhood Resource Officers respond to these types of calls is the best decision because they do not undergo the same extensive training that BPD Officers do.
Thank you for taking the time to read my comment. I’d like to see how the deputy mayor would respond to the concerns I’ve listed or to provide numbers of the amount of calls IUPD takes vs. BPD as well as how many calls NRO’s respond to in comparison to BPD. BPD provided numbers and information that we cannot dispute. If the Deputy Mayor disagrees with what they’re sharing, I think he’s needs to respond back with a data-driven rebuttal that shows that these things make a big enough difference for the department that marketable and competitive compensation is unnecessary.