To attract and retain more officers and promote more community engagement, the Ector County ISD Police Department is working on several initiatives — from horses to motorcycles.
Horses, of which they currently have one, is a community engagement project and motorcycles are less expensive than cruisers.
In 2022, the department had 26 officers and now they have 53. There is a state mandate to have an officer at every campus.
“We’re trying to develop a pipeline within our schools to connect our officers with our youth and also bring attention to our animal program at the Ag Farm that will tie more kids into that program as well, and engage officers in our community together, out in the public,” Chief Jeff Daniels said. “Animals are a great way to do that. They’re used all over the nation … It also helps with recruitment for the department.”
ECISD Police Sgt. Melissa Butts offered the horse proposal.
She said she would purchase the horse and keep it as her own, furnish the feed and pay the veterinarian bills, Daniels said.
“She’s a great hire. She’s been here for several years. She came from the Odessa Police Department, big in community engagement, sees the benefit of how it’s going to connect our officers to kids. She purchased it (the horse) on her own to bring that here, just to get the program started. So it’s cost us nothing to this point,” Daniels added.
The horses, which have drummed up a lot of interest, will be used at community events, football games, graduations and other occasions.
Officers need to come to police departments that offer more than just their jobs.
“Police departments around the nation are short handed. We’re all fighting for the same people, so as a school district, we’ve got to come up with inventive ways to recruit people and maintain people. If we’re one dimensional, we’re going to fail. We’re not going to be able to maintain,” Daniels said.
Officers will go where they have better — or more — opportunities. Although the hours are often better than city departments, Daniels said the ECISD Police don’t pay as well as larger departments.
“That’s why you come up with these other programs. We have Honor Guard, a team of officers that dress up in their Class A uniforms and represent the department at things such as funerals and dignitary events. These things give the officers a little bit more … to do than their regular job; (it) gives them some ownership in the department. It’s a great recruitment tool, so as an agency, if we’re going to succeed, we’ve got to be able to compete and programs like that, they’ll allow us to compete,” Daniels said.
He added that they want to hire the best applicants they can.
Motorcycles are a great way to save money. Daniels said you can get two motorcycles for the price of one car. A motorcycle costs about $30,000 and a cruiser $75,000 to $80,000. Motorcycles equipped for police officers are already being made.
“We used to have them in our area for years, and they did away with them, so we’re looking at bringing them back,” Daniels said.
He acknowledged that an officer did die on a motorcycle, “but the same thing happens in vehicles.”
“There are downsides to everything, but they’re also upsides. If it generates interest in my department, then it’s something I really need to consider, especially if it’s a cost saving interest,” Daniels said.
He said they are in the process of looking at motorcycles. “We’ve got to reach out to some more vendors and see what their cost is. We want to get the best vehicle for the best price,” Daniels added.
The department has had an emergency response team since 2001. It was established after the Columbine High School shooting.
They have had various iterations of SWAT teams where officers become part of the Odessa Police Department SWAT team, for example.
“We’ve always had that in place. We’re just trying to revamp it” and get some more officers on it and get them trained to those standards, he said.
If there is a situation like Uvalde, they will be the first ones there so they need to be trained, equipped and have the know-how to handle the situation, Daniels said.
“We’re doing all we can to meet this government mandate of arming our campuses with the best practice possible, and that’s putting a police officer out there. We’re doing, in my opinion … a great job. We have nine positions left. We’ve put in for (federal) grants to help pay for those positions. We’re waiting on the word from the grant system, to see if we’ve been awarded.
“If we’ve been awarded, then we’ll move forward, and it’ll take up, I think, 75% of those officer salaries for three years, for the last nine positions,” Daniels said.
If not, the district has said they are going to provide police officers to the campuses, depending on availability.
Whether they get the grants or not, they plan to hire the officers. Daniels said they are already getting inquiries about positions.
The department also has received a grant to build a video wall at the police department that will help provide live intelligence to officers out in the field.
“This grant is going to give us the capability to staff positions that are needed for the department’s growth … because of the sheer number of officers we’ve added … that are going to be able to watch our campuses live,” Daniels said.
The screens will be monitored by civilians at the police department in real time.
“The system we’re building here is a wall of monitors … They’re going to be big monitors that have all the little cameras broken up on them. They’ll have a main screen they can watch and drag if they want to pull in something at Crockett into the main one that they think is going on, they can see it there,” he said.
Nimitz incident
A threat from a seventh grader that turned out to be a hoax put Nimitz Middle School under lockdown for a little more than 30 minutes Sept. 13.
The hoax was met with a swift law enforcement response in large numbers as well as dozens of parents parking up and down JBS Parkway and running toward the school prior to the news it was a hoax.
The student faced a felony charge of making a false report for creating a hoax about a shooter inside the school.
“It was an opportunist, and that person’s been arrested and being dealt with through the criminal system and also through the administrative system of the school district,” he added.
There are also outside threats through social media that the district has seen recently.
“We investigate every one, depending on the information we receive about the threat. It just depends on how many times it’s been shared, where it was posted. We work closely with state and federal agencies that have divisions that are capable of investigating these online threats … We work closely with them to get them the information, to get them as much of the the stuff that’s being passed around as possible, and see if their analysts can trace it back to the original poster. Sometimes they’re able to, and sometimes it’s just been shared too many times. It’s a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot, and we’re not able to do with anything with that. That’s why we ask the public (not to) share those things. That as soon as it’s seen, it’s reported, because that really helps our chance of finding out who is responsible for creating that threat.”
