Over the past few months, Chief Bradford and his command staff have worked on two issues that directly impact patrol officers who are in the call-for-service loop.

The first issue deals with making more officers available for the call-for-service loop. It has caused the command staff members to struggle with the idea of moving some officers from one patrol station to another.

So far this project has stalled somewhat since their initial formula caused them to spend too much time struggling with how their formula was devised. Such conflicts eventually led them back to the drawing board to discover which variables in their formula were germane to HPD's patrol culture.

The initial numbers they generated had some stations losing officers while others gained, but failed to take into account how each was specifically assigned. As a result, these numbers met serious challenges.

That being said, HPOU has an opinion: More officers need to be deployed into the call-for-service loop to make absolutely sure that officers currently in that loop have expected back-up when they need it. Hopefully, this would mean that the command staff would take a serious look at how patrol is truly staffed.

Therefore, it is important that officers in the call loop at all stations provide us their input. We need it to make functional suggestions to the command staff based on the common sense needed to help officers rather than further hamstringing them in the reallocation of current staffing.

The second issue impacting patrol officers is the patrol productivity standards program. Chief Bradford has told us that he and his staff developed this program after listening to the concerns of patrol officers who complained to him that police administrators need to take action against officers in patrol who don't carry their share of the work load.

The chief mentioned at a number of open command staff meetings and a few coordinators meetings (command staff and captains) that he would initiate a program establishing minimum criteria for officers. He said the identified officers who were not pulling their weight would be required to meet him in his office with their sergeant to explain why they are having problems with the productivity standards.

We believe Bradford and his command staff need to be very careful how they handle this particular issue. Many patrol officers continue to express to us their feeling that the command staff regards them as unwanted stepchildren who should be badgered and overburdened instead of recognizing them as the well-respected backbone of the department.

To reinforce our position, we reminded the chief and some of his command staff colleagues that they were ill advised to have handled patrol officers and the court situation the way they did. Ultimately, their actions were extremely detrimental to management's desired strategy to encourage patrol officers to issue more traffic citations. The idea to hammer the stuffing out of hard-working officers with ridiculous disciplinary actions only caused officers assigned to patrol to do their jobs but not issue traffic citations.

With points like these in mind, we convinced the chief and his command staff to make some modifications to their initial criteria for measuring patrol productivity.

We suggested that the program have a pilot period to work out the kinks. They went for the idea.

We suggested leaving FTO's out of the patrol productivity program while they are actually training rookies. They went for this one too.

We suggested that a monthly average rather than a set number of traffic citations each day be utilized in the productivity standards. And they adopted this third suggestion as well.

Therefore, during the month of July the patrol productivity program will be used primary to determine an acceptable minimum standard for patrol officers. What is important now is that we hear from patrol officers from every station about what we can do as a union to make relevant suggestions to make sure this program won't turn into yet another burden for patrol.

Please call, email or pay us a visit at the HPOU office to make further suggestions about how we can help to keep the program helpful instead of harmful.

Remember the suggested minimum eight-point daily average is not necessarily based on any factual data and it could be changed appropriately. Review the criteria that the chief devised for awarding points and let us know what is missing. We have already determined a number of changes that need to be considered; however, it is our strategic view that we should wait until the July review period is completed before we make any suggestions.

In closing, it is important to note that we take our responsibility seriously as it relates to promoting better pay, benefits and working conditions. Please don't mistake our behind-the-scenes style of addressing problems impacting police officers as being some type of unholy alliance with management.

To date, this strategy has generally been successful although it certainly doesn't mean everything has gone our way. We can definitely say that, for the most part, we've had a much more successful problem-resolution process in place since the adoption of Meet and Confer. Before those successes, we huffed and puffed through one frustration after another and ultimately accomplished virtually nothing.

Surely none of us wants to go down that road again.

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