MASSACHUSETTS POLICE ADDRESSING COMPUTER THEFT ISSUEThe Herald Journal: Local NewsLogan police changing with the times


By Tyler Riggs
With Logan and Cache Valley having grown dramatically in the last 10 years, the types of crimes seen by the Logan City Police Department have changed.

Richard Hendricks, the 52-year-old chief of the department, has witnessed the changes firsthand -- not only during the last 10 years, but even in the last five.

Hendricks sat down with The Herald Journal last week to talk about them.

Q: During your time as police chief, what are some things you've seen change in the Police Department?

A: I think the first thing that comes to mind is the concept and philosophy of community policing. They're finally understanding the notion that instead of just being in the business of detection and apprehension, we need to become problem solvers. So, that requires us to take on a new form of policing product and to deliver a new police product. That's probably the thing that I'm most pleased with, is the philosophy of community policing and how we've embraced it here not only in this department, but in the community.

Q: Are a higher percentage of people in the community reporting crimes today than 10 years ago?

A: I think the very nature of community policing is the establishment of partnerships. A police chief knows that when he takes on the philosophy of community policing, that he's actually going to encourage people to report crime. It's quite a gamble or a risk for a police manager to take that position, because for a time the crime rate will increase, and the goal is to manage that increase and learn how to deal with that increase so that you go over the hump, and then the rate starts to fall. Now that we've been doing that for 10 years, we see that start to happen. The crime rate has been falling steadily the last three years. That partnership is the most important component of community policing, and so we actually encourage people to file reports and to give us information. I think you're seeing an attitude, too, of people taking responsibility for their own policing, their own peace and safety, and that becomes a part of that process where they report more. They just say to themselves, 'Not in my neighborhood, not on my street, not in my block, not in my home.' They're drawing their own lines in the sand, and they're asking us to help them do that.

Q: What is the biggest criminal problem facing this community?

A: Theft. Theft is our No. 1 crime, and that is a pleasant position to have. It's not robbery, it's not homicides, but the things that motivate those thefts concern us. The age of the perpetrator, whether they're a juvenile or an adult, that concerns us. The amount of property that is lost or the amount of property that is damaged. It's quite a traumatic event to have your business or your home broken into while you're not there or even while you're there. It's a very traumatic experience, it's almost like a personal violation. So that's the No. 1 problem that we face and we're focusing on. Obviously, we still have all the other crime, but that one has been No. 1 on the list.

Q: As the community is growing, are we losing the feeling that we've had for so many years of being able to leave your doors unlocked at night?

A: We needed to start being concerned about that years ago. In response to your question, the atmosphere and the environment, the demographics of what and who we police has changed dramatically just in the last five years. I've seen this change in my tenure to where the first five years is different from the second five years. We're sending detectives all over the western United States to interview suspects. People are coming to our community for the purpose of committing crimes, and then they leave, and we have to track them down. That's a phenomenon that we never had to deal with before. In the last five years that's grown dramatically. Our travel needs, our cooperating with other agencies and depending on other departments to do things for us, as we do for them, has expanded dramatically. We're not just stealing from each other, people are coming here to steal from us and to victimize us. That's become a new part of our policing strategies, dealing with this outside component, this nonresident component. It's been very difficult.

Q: Overall, is Logan a safe place to live?

A: It's a wonderful place to live. The sad part is that I spend my whole day seeing all the problems, but then I'm constantly reminded as I go to a high school function with my children or I go into my neighborhood, this is a wonderful place to live. As I have opportunities to go to different places, none of those places have been as wonderful as Cache Valley. The weather ... I could take or leave that weather thing, but as far as the people, the community, the surroundings, the landscape, it just doesn't get any better than Logan.

Q: What are the police doing to curb drugs in the valley?

A: We take responsibility for the narcotics strike force that serves Cache and Rich counties. Those detectives and that operation is housed here on the second floor of our building. We take responsibility and accept the obligation to manage that effort. That's the primary law enforcement effort on battling drugs. The drug issue and the meth issue, that is one of the major motivators for our theft problem. Those are people that distribute the meth. In so many ways -- from shoplifting all the way through to burglary and mail theft and identity theft, computer theft -- that scenario contributes to our quality of life here in a dramatic way. Our group of agents have been very active, they serve search warrants weekly, they've done good. The last two years I think we've been the most active of my time here. I'm very pleased with their efforts. People say that we only focus on the users or you only focus on the dealers or the manufacturers. We focus on everybody, and we go after each category of drug use with the same amount of enthusiasm. Because it has such a dramatic impact on theft, and the other issues of our life, we're not going to turn any aspect of it aside. It's just taking a blanket approach, we have the luxury of being able to manage this population and being able to manage our agents work, it's not like we're overwhelmed. We can strike out with a blanket approach, and I think our reverse-buy operation that we just completed is a perfect example of targeting different aspects of the drug world.

Q: Are efforts to curb drug use paying off with decline in other areas of crime, such as theft?

A: I think so, you see dips and changes in the numbers in different categories, like in the juvenile category. That's the one that is most important for me, is the juvenile effort. Our partnership in the school districts, and our partnerships at BATC are very valuable partnerships. When we take those kinds of efforts and move those kinds of things away from those campuses, the learning environment, athletic environment, the social environment improves dramatically. Those school administrators see that change, they welcome that change, and we're grateful for those partnerships. That's a big deal. You could actually see that as you look through and see last year's reports at the high schools and compare them to this year's reports at the high schools. You can see where some things have changed and gone down, some other things have gone up. We replace problems with other problems, we're thinking that our job security is pretty strong, we're not going to work ourselves out of business, but we're going to impact people's lives and we're going to impact the quality of their life, and I think that's the product we bring to the Police Department.

Q: What is the status of school programs like DARE in Logan schools?

A: We phased DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) and GREAT (Gang Resistance Education and Training) out of the middle school and high school six years ago. I believe DARE is very appropriate on the fifth-grade level. I believe that it has lesson content and subject matter that is very appropriate for that age group. We came to understand ... six years ago and felt uncomfortable presenting it in the middle school and high school setting. We felt it was too remedial, we felt that the message had been given and that they needed more information. You're doing different things in different stages of your career of being a student. You're formulating patterns and lifestyle decisions as a fifth-grader and as a middle-schooler. By the time you've arrived at high school, a lot of those decisions have been made. You're in a lifestyle and you've got a pattern. Different messages and different consequences and different rules and penalties of life apply in different stages. We were one of the first police departments to take DARE out of the high school in the state of Utah. The DARE people from Salt Lake came and tried to argue with me.

Q: What program is in the schools now?

A: What we did was we developed our own curriculum. We realized we had a police officer here who had teaching experience, in fact we had a couple of them. One had taught here locally and one had taught in the school districts of Chicago. We took that experience and assigned them the task of developing a curriculum that we copyrighted that's called Side by Side, Cops and Students Together. It talks about dating issues, it talks about social issues, it talks about drug issues, health issues, property rights issues, gun issues, safety concerns, driving, it has all these chapters and the school district can present it to a teacher and say if there's a chapter that fits in here, you're a health teacher, here's a chapter on health, we'll send a school resource officer to teach this chapter.

So we're teaching it to more students, with more teachers being partnered in with it. Our exposure is greater, and we're hitting more topics and more subjects. We have an officer at the middle school teaching a science and technology class. They're using the science and technology that we use here at the Police Department, with forensics and evidence, crime lab, and then we have an officer teaching a mathematics class and he's teaching mathematics with the geometry and physics that we use to calculate speed, skid marks and damages and stopping distances at accidents. So we've increased our exposure dramatically and hopefully are giving better information at the same time.

Q: How important is it to have a resource police officer in schools?

A: It's very important. The first thing that comes about is they're getting on a first-name basis with kids. The kids get on a first-name relationship with the officer. I don't know how many times I've walked through the mall and have people come up to me and say hello ... and they tell me about their resource officer. They're very valuable. The second reason that it's very important is that they see who is at risk sooner, and they can intervene sooner. They can involve partnerships with teachers and parents, school officials, and get kids the extra attention and necessary solutions that they need. For those two reasons, in and of itself, it's been very, very valuable. We've averted several catastrophes because we've found people who are at risk and we've gotten them the things that they've needed.

Q: As the police chief, do you ever get out in the field to work?

A: Not as much as I'd like. I enjoyed being a policeman, I loved being a police officer. After 60 or 70 hours in the office a week, and attending every city meeting known to man that can be on the calendar, your family looks at you and says, "When is enough enough?" I do go out to some calls. I'll go stop by and I'll help. I do try to set aside some time. They call me all the time for SWAT callouts and things like that, I try to have a hands-on approach. I have to depend on those captains to take care of the day-to-day operations. The chief's job is basically policy, employee law, budget and lawsuits. I spend a lot of time visiting with people who have concerns, and internal investigations are my responsibility. It's really difficult for me to find time to get out and run some radar. I love being with them, it's a great group of employees, we have a great staff.

Q: With the legislative session coming up, is there anything that you are particularly interested in targeting that the Police Department needs in the coming year?

A: We don't specifically get a lot of budget or a lot of revenue from the state legislative process. I try to play a large role down there in our Chiefs of State Association. I've been on the Board of Directors for that for six of the 10 years that I've been a chief and been the president for two years. We focus in the Legislature on the kinds of laws that they are contemplating and voting on. We try to make sure that they know what the reasonableness is and what the practicality is of us enforcing these laws and making these laws work. A lot of people don't realize it, actually the chiefs and sheriff's associations are more concerned about fines and penalties and the increasing of those fines and penalties. We don't go down there and ask for increases, we generally ask them to reconsider something. It's very difficult for an officer to write a ticket when he knows the penalty is $200 or $400. Here's somebody in a minivan with a bunch of child seats in it, they don't even know if they can make it to the end of the month, and you're handing them a piece of paper that's going to cost them $200 or $300. That's a difficult assignment for a police officer to do, for any police officer to do. We spend a lot of those 45 days trying to make sure people understand whether or not they're being reasonable.

Q: Is retention of officers a problem with this Police Department?

A: It's not so much that they can make more money (elsewhere.) We're below the state average, but we're close to it. Our pay has been improved dramatically over the years. The problem that we have in the law enforcement profession is advancement and promotion. They're all waiting for me to die so that they can all move up. It's a common problem in a lot of professions. Only so many guys can be captain, only so many people can be sergeants and lieutenants. Career development and career motivation, positive career development is a very important part of the management process in a police department. If a guy is going to just write tickets for 20 years, he'll be burned out. Transferring from assignment to assignment is a very important part of what I do, and what the captains to. You can't leave a guy in narcotics for more than two or three years, and you can't have a guy investigate sex crimes against children for more than two or three years before you wonder if their eyes are clear. Those are hard cases. You can't do them five days a week, eight hours a day, year after year, without having it affect you.

We used to have a real problem with it, what our problem was, more than money or opportunities, was that the only place you could go to get training to be a police officer was on the Wasatch Front at the police academy in Salt Lake. We were finding people from Layton and Midvale and Murray and all these places going to the police academy, becoming certifiable police officers, and then they'd come up here to get a job and then a job becomes available back where they lived, and they would go be back home. We were losing a lot in that scenario. Opening the police academy at Bridgerland has stabilized our work force dramatically. We now have an opportunity for local people to go and receive the training, get the certificates from the state, and now we're hiring off a list of people, by state law, that want to live here in Logan, and have roots here in Logan. We haven't had a lot of turnover. That academy has been going now for almost eight years.

Q: How can the Logan Police Department be a leader in future developments for law enforcement in Cache Valley?

A: We have an excellent relationship with all the other police departments and the Sheriff's Office here. We get along with them, and we do projects and operations together. We share training, we meet monthly as administrators and managers, we have a good relationship here in this valley. I would like to think that we contribute positively. We provide the drug services for everyone, we provide dispatch services for everyone. We provide an evidence storage system for several agencies. We try to be a partner with everyone here in the valley. The issues for law enforcement in this valley are going to be how to keep up with the changing demands of crime.

As we go into identity theft and computer theft, that's a whole other world apart from just a burglary or a rape or a robbery. The losses and the potential for losses in those kinds of crimes are staggering. We have to be ready as a Police Department to respond to those kinds of complaints. The financial crimes unit of this department is going to grow dramatically. It's not just bad checks anymore. They're working cases up there that involve hundreds of thousands of dollars.