INDIANAPOLIS — House Bill 1186, introduced by Rep. Steve Bartels, would restrict the law enforcement duties of reserve police officers in Indiana and limit their ability to work off duty at a time when police chiefs struggle to recruit new officers.
Small-town marshals and police chiefs told FOX59/CBS4 that such legislation would make it harder for them to fill empty slots in their departments and provide low-cost police protection in municipalities where tax revenues are limited.
”If you restrict the police departments on reserve police officers, I’m not gonna be able to fill all my shifts,” said Edinburgh Police Chief Doyne Little. “If I have open coverages, we’re gonna have a liability and concern for officer safety. Nobody wants to be out here by themselves.”
Little said he has four reserves to back up the 14 full-time officers on his force and they typically fill vacation shifts or work special events for crowd and site control.
Under the proposed legislation, the reserves, who often are trained to state standards or have state accreditation, would be restricted to patrolling in their town boundaries and not enforcing the law or backing up officers in neighboring municipalities unless there was an inter-governmental memo of understanding.
”By that law if I go over to the Papa John’s outside of our city for a robbery because we’re close, that reserve officer would not have police powers once he left our city,” said Southport Police Chief Tom Vaughn who has approximately 30 reserve officers to augment his three full-time officers. ” Let’s say you’re leaving your shift and you’re five blocks outside the city and someone’s being robbed, you took an oath to uphold the law and to protect people, but now, you don’t have police powers.”
Vaughn cites the low crime rate in Southport, an enclave surrounded by Indianapolis, Greenwood and I-65, to the prevalence of reserve officers patrolling neighborhoods and discouraging transient criminals from victimizing the southside community.
”Our crime rate is down and it is down because they are actively patrolling during the day and during the night,” Vaughn said.
The bill would also put limits on the off-duty employment of reserve officers who often take side jobs as secondary or primary sources of income so they can volunteer shifts at their home department.
” It’s really rough to get anyone who wants to do this full-time anymore let alone for free,” said Little. “Reserves make no money.”
The issue is most prevalent in Indianapolis where visitors may find reserve officers from rural towns or marshals offices directing traffic or providing security at major events.
”If you think about downtown, if you have something going at the convention center, you got a Pacers game going on, you have all these other things downtown, you probably have 300-400 officers downtown working part-time,” said Vaughn. “IMPD can’t sustain that. Marion County can’t sustain that. So, if I had to guess, I’m saying 70% of everybody downtown on the weekend working are out-of-county officers.”
Indiana sheriffs were reportedly involved in a conference call this afternoon to develop a response to the legislation.
Rep. Bartels was not available for comment about his bill.
