The Grover Beach Police Department is upgrading its facilities, adding a drone program, and hiring more police personnel to modernize and improve working conditions.
Grover Beach Police Cmdr. Jim Munro told New Times that the department felt like it was bursting at the seams and wanted to upgrade into the 21st century.
In 2023 the department was able to hire nine new police personnel, which enabled it to be fully staffed for the first time in years. Six hires filled police officer positions.
“Two of them were already working as law enforcement officers in other agencies, another three came from agencies where they were working in a custody facility, and nobody was straight out of the academy really,” he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused academy classes to be canceled or delayed, Munro said. That and a growing unease around the profession in the wake of anti-police protests in 2020 were the main reasons for the department’s lack of staff before 2023.
“During the George Floyd tragedy, there was a lot of negative talk and negative influence about law enforcement, and I believe that probably played a part, but what we’re seeing is kind of a turnaround at this point,” he said. “We’re definitely seeing more applicants than we were two or three years ago, so I’m hoping that we’re kind of past that and people realize that, especially on the Central Coast, being in law enforcement is a great career.”
Funding for those new employees’ salaries comes out of the city’s general fund, Grover Beach City Manager Matthew Bronson told New Times.
“These were not new positions added to the police budget, as the new employees filled vacant positions,” Bronson said.
The Police Department is also waiting on six new patrol vehicles that are being outfitted with the equipment, lights, and sirens they need, according to Munro.
“The really neat thing is that Grover Beach right now and for years has had all-white patrol vehicles; we’re the last agency in the county to have that, but we’re going to be switching to the classic black and white patrol vehicle look, which looks really nice,” Munro said. “We hope to see those by April or May. It’s kind of a long process.”
To help pay for these six new vehicles, the city will enter into a lease-purchase agreement with Government Capital Corporation that will cost $153,506 annually for five years with an interest rate of 5.4 percent, according to a Nov. 13, 2023, staff report. The first payment is due in 2025 and the total repayment will be $767,534.
To help navigate emergencies more efficiently and keep officers safe, the Grover Beach Police Department started a drone programāand it’s the biggest drone unit operation on the Central Coast, according to the department. Drone operators are a mix of sworn police officers and community service technicians, Munro said.
“We deploy them for missing children, missing adults, people that are running from the officers, and we can put the drone in the air really quickly and really get a kind of an eye in the sky,” Munro said. “We also use them for other things like when we get an alarm call at a business, or we can fly a drone inside a business or house without exposing our officers to danger.”
When police personnel aren’t responding to calls and need a minute to relax, they can visit their new wellness center, converted out of the city’s old police booking cells. Munro said that with recent state law changes, most arrestees are released with a citation instead of going to jail, so the city wasn’t using the booking cells as much as it once did.
“One of them is an overflow locker room because we have more employees than lockers at this point. The other cell includes a recliner chair along with a massage chair, and the point around those two things is that it allows our employees to kind of relax and clear their mind a little bit before going on to the next call,” he said.
“The third part is now a workout area, and it’s for all employees to use to get a good workout in, and we allow for 45 minutes of what we call wellness time each day while they work.” Ī
This article appears in Feb 1-11, 2024.