Roger Vanderpool is returning to his old stomping grounds — sort of — as director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS), the agency with which he cut his teeth in law enforcement, serving as a patrol officer and investigator for two decades.

Things will be difficult, though, for the former Pinal County sheriff, who took over for Dennis Garrett, who retired in January. The department continues to face a shortage of employees, both for patrolling Arizona’s highways and working behind the scenes to solve crimes and process evidence.

Mr. Vanderpool sat down with Arizona Capitol Times on May 6 to discuss what challenges the department has to overcome and how the agency will work toward serving the citizens of the state.

What are the biggest issues facing the department?

Obviously, the tremendous growth of the state and the manpower issue of being able to hire enough officers and also retain those officers. I think there’s a pay issue — a pay issue that [all of] state government finds itself in.

But, probably even larger than those — my two top priorities: The crime lab. There are over 3,200 cases backlogged, some eight- to nine months behind in processing. And that ties into that growth, because it’s not just DPS using the state crime lab. Only Tucson, Scottsdale, Phoenix, and possibly Mesa are the agencies that have their own crime labs. And even those are not totally full-service crime labs. DPS is the only full-service, doing-everything crime lab. We have four labs — Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff and Lake Havasu, and Lake Havasu is not a full crime lab, but it’s able to do some things.

So, there’s a tremendous backlog. That backlog impacts not only the criminal justice system, but, more importantly, it impacts victims, because until evidence is processed and those results are [sent] back to investigators and the attorneys, cases can’t move through the court system — victims can’t have closure. Often times, we think about it being a criminal justice problem. It is a victim’s, a person’s problem.

One of our highest increases that we see is in DNA submission. You look at the world we live in and the type of employees, the criminalists, the forensic people we need. This is not someone you just hire right off the street. And the technology involved — this is not equipment I go down to Wal-Mart and purchase.

It’s a heavy investment and we’re in dire need of building a larger crime lab in Tucson. That one is very small and it’s outdated and it’s overflowing, and because it’s overflowing, it backs up this central one, and so we really need a bigger crime lab, a bigger crime lab in the Tucson area.

That’s my number one priority.

The second is interoperability. The first responders of Arizona, enabling them to talk to each other. When you have an emergency, when you have a disaster, if you can’t communicate, you’ve got chaos. We’ve talked about this and talked about this and talked about this for years. We’ve got to do something.

How do you plan to recruit more officers and increase retention?

Obviously, we’re working with the Legislature and the Governor’s Office on pay issues. We need to reinvent ourselves to become more efficient with what we have and more efficient in our deployment of our officers.

We also need to market the agency, and we’re combining some of our units — our public information officers to our video unit to our duty office into one unit that we’re going to call our community outreach and education unit.

One of the challenges DPS has is like the military: you’ve got to downsize, become a more mobile, rapid, technology-based organization. And when you look at the military, there’s one branch that is meeting its recruitment goals all the time — the Marines. And what message are they sending? “The few, the proud…” I mean, everyone knows what that is. It’s a similar message that I want to send to the state of Arizona about DPS.

This is a good agency; we need to get back to being a great agency. We just kind of need to polish that badge up. We need to tell folks about the wonderful things that go on daily that DPS employees do, both within their job, but [also] within their communities across the state of Arizona.

The Legislature just agreed to give DPS officers a much-needed pay raise. How much of an impact does that have and are more pay increases needed to bring the department on par with other law enforcement agencies across the state?

The increase will help. It still leaves us behind pay parity. When we’re looking at pay parity, we’re looking at being on average with the top five law enforcement agencies around the state.

Yes, we will need more in the future, and one of the issues we have coming up, and not just for us but for law enforcement in general, is about a year out. It’s called “drops,” which is the retirement program where officers went into retirement early for investment purposes. That will add to our vacancy rate, but other [law enforcement] agencies are going to have the same affect. So now, everyone that’s searching for quality candidates, there’s going to be even more people searching for candidates. You’ve got communities like Peoria right now who are offering signing bonuses and offering finder fees to their city employees. If you find someone who comes on as a police officer, you get like $500 and the individual that signs on as a police officer gets like a two-, three-, four-thousand dollar signing bonus.

We’re all competing in that same pool for those same quality applicants.

Having the resources to maintain a patrol presence on state highways has been difficult for the department in recent years. With the manpower limitations DPS has, how do you make the decision which areas of the need receive the most attention?

We’ve got to take a look at the growth of Arizona. Arizona is changing and some of the communities are rapidly changing. We’ve got to take a look at our accident ratio, our response [times], our calls for services.

But also we’ve got to take a look at administrative positions. Are those best suited by someone wearing a badge and a gun, or can we convert that position, maybe civilianize that position, and move those resources out into either the Highway Patrol or Criminal Investigations?

I also think we have to ramp up and maximize our use of volunteers, both as reserve officers and even volunteers [who] come in to do some of these administrative functions, but then also look at retirees in a part-time position, especially some of our own retirees and recent retirees that maybe don’t want to come back to work full-time but will work part-time in areas such as our duty office. We do need an individual who has a knowledge of law enforcement, a knowledge of DPS, but not necessarily do we need an individual in there wearing a gun and a badge when we have security officers right outside that have the gun and the badge.

I think there are some ways of maximizing some of the resources out on the highways that we haven’t really tapped into yet that we are working on right now and plan on doing that over the next few months. We’re going to be doing what we call a “Tan Day,” and that is everyone in these administrative offices — again, that are law enforcement personnel — are going to be wearing their uniform at least one day a month. They’re going to work freeways around the metropolitan area or areas of the state that we’re having a problem in. Everyone goes back to job one, back to basics.

You built up a strong core of more than 120 citizen volunteers for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office during your time there
. How do you plan on doing that on the statewide level?

Basically, the same way we did it down there. We’re in the process of defining and creating a volunteer coordinator position and then we will assess the needs of the agency and [decide] where we can use volunteers. We know that we can use volunteers over here in the duty office [at DPS headquarters] and even in areas like the road. We’ve got a lot of areas like the crime lab and different areas.

So, we’re going to look [at], where can we use volunteers? And, also, where will the managers and employees accept volunteers? Because, initially, you’ve got to have people that are willing to accept volunteers. Once you start the program, I think other people start seeing the benefit and it becomes widely accepted, but you’ve got to start out with that acceptance.

I think, also, citizens academies, so people become aware of who DPS is, what DPS does and how they can become involved in DPS.

You worked at DPS for two decades and you are familiar with the department and the way it operates, but managing more than 1,000 officers and nearly 2,000 support personnel is a daunting task. How do you approach managing an agency that’s so large?

I see myself as more of a transformational manager and one of change; very participatory. In fact, at my weekly executive staff meetings, I have all five of our employee groups at the table — their presidents or an executive board member at the table. Like the Highway Patrol Association, FOP [Fraternal Order of Police], Troopers Coalition, Latino Peace Officers and Women in Policing.

It’s not Roger Vanderpool’s Arizona Department of Public Safety, it’s Arizona’s Department of Public Safety. When I’m driving my car, I look through the top third of my windshield; other people look through middle and some people look through the bottom. So, there’s different views and I sure don’t have all the answers.

If it comes down to it’s 50/50 and someone’s got to make a decision, well, that’s one of the reasons I’m here, I can make decisions, but I want to have a lot of input and I want to have buy-in from our employees. Plus, it also enables information to go back out quicker.

You’ve been outspoken about making homeland security and smuggling illegal immigrants a top priority. How will the department be involved in those areas and how will you work with the federal government on those issues?

And they are the role of the federal government and I never want to get into doing their job because I do believe that if you start doing their job, they’ll do even less. We have got enough to do ourselves. Historically, it tends to show that if you start doing someone else’s job because they’re having a problem doing it, often times they will start doing even less and you will end up absorbing the whole thing. We’re not equipped or prepared to do that.

What I look at us being able to do is identifying criminal organizations that are profiting on smuggling, whether it be smuggling people or smuggling dope or smuggling firearms. Those are things that we can make an impact on. We do that through, obviously, our criminal investigations, but we also do that through those patrol officers on the road when they make stops, just through intelligence gathering.

But, we have to be very careful that we aren’t profiling. Being of a different ethnic background than you or I is not an indicator of criminal activity. Now, that…means that if there’s a robbery at the Circle K and the individual describes the [suspect] as a white male, you shouldn’t be stopping a black male. Absent specific crime-related, witness-related [information], the fact that an individual doesn’t look like Roger Vanderpool doesn’t mean that they’re involved in any crime.

The Legislature recently killed a bill that would have prevented photo radar on the Loop 101 in Scottsdale. What are your thoughts on using photo radar on an urban freeway and how will with department work to curb the excessive speeding on that roadway?

My thoughts on the use of technology, I’m not necessarily opposed to it. I believe that technology needs to be used in conjunction and under the direction and control of both ADOT and DPS. It is a state highway.

I am not so sure I would be in favor of fixed locations [of photo radar] as much as maybe taking a look at mobile locations that can be moved. The purpose is to slow people down all over, not just small stretches, where they come flying up to that stretch and then jam on their brakes. I would be more inclined to want to take a look at mobile-type units that could be moved around to those areas where we are having specific speed-related problems and crashes that are related to speed and inattention.

How we’re going to address that in the meantime [is] that “Tan Day.” We’re going to flood the area with officers. And those days are going to rotate. Again, the use of volunteers, just driving a marked patrol car around, [creating] that halo around that patrol car. The utilization of teaming up with — much like we do in the holidays with the DUI task forces — expand that and do some general traffic enforcement task forces. And it may be out on the freeway today, it may be on the city street or the county road tomorrow. Maximizing our collective resources because both the cities and the counties and the state, none of us have more than enough people.

Thank you very much for your time.

No problem, thank you for coming over. —