Broken Arrow police discuss services, future needs with residents

Written By: Brittany Harlow in collaboration with Broken Arrow Sentinel  

(BROKEN ARROW, Okla.) For a city that receives 139,000 calls for service a year, predicting how a skyrocketing population will impact those numbers over the next 10 years is a tall order. But it’s a necessary one, said Broken Arrow Police Department Chief Brandon Berryhill during a recent community meeting.

When Berryhill moved to Broken Arrow in 1994, the population was 72,000 and there were 75 officers. The city now has roughly 120,000 people and the police force has more than doubled.

The department hired Matrix Consulting Group last year to forecast its needs for the next decade in terms of people, staffing, facilities and where the population growth is.

Matrix will look at building permits, road patterns and population trends, how diversified the city’s population is getting to present a picture of what the department’s needs will be.

Berryhill and Matrix Consulting Group Manager Aaron Baggarly spoke with residents last month in two in-person events at Northeastern State University-Broken Arrow. The discussions centered around residents’ perceptions of BAPD, their areas of concern, and what they want from law enforcement and other services moving forward.

Baggerly said as Broken Arrow continues to grow the police department is evolving, a trend that is mirrored in many departments nationwide.

The evolution of police services includes non-sworn personnel responding to non-emergency calls, citizen self-reporting online, and teaming up on home surveillance, all discussed at a community meeting Monday – as was the notion of embedding mental health professionals with officers that respond to mental health calls.

“If you have someone along that does that for a career, they’re more apt to handle that and deescalate the situation quicker than we can, because just our uniform sometimes is going to escalate the situation,” Berryhill said.

“That is a model we’re looking at doing. I don’t think we’re interested in a model where we’re sending out a mental health professional to a call without an officer. But we may do a corresponding model. That’s growing across the country to help us identify the needs of our civilians and citizens that may have an ongoing problem.”

Other community issues discussed at the public meetings included communication, cyber investigations, stray animals, traffic and property crime, homelessness and the rise in fentanyl trafficking.

“Fentanyl is a huge problem here,” Berryhill said. “The rise in fentanyl really coincided with the use of marijuana becoming more legalized because the money’s not there. The drug cartels wanted money so they went out with marijuana and they came with fentanyl. So that’s why you’re seeing it kind of going across the country right now.”

Regarding BAPD’s perceived presence, Berryhill said patrols are mainly call driven at this time. He said their fence line is 111 square miles, of which 55 are incorporated in the city. And they usually have a maximum of 14 officers patrolling per shift.

“If you don’t see a lot of officers in your neighborhood, you probably are not experiencing high crime,” Berryhill said.

We’re told BAPD began working with Matrix at the end of last year to develop the new 10-year staffing plan, which was paid for out of the department’s general operating funds.

Berryhill said Matrix’s first draft report is a first phase of their work and will include about 150 pages of comprehensive analysis of one full year of operations.

“It will be looking at all 139,000 calls in dispatch, how long it takes an officer to drive to a call, how long it takes to write the report, how long it takes for an animal control officer to do their job and how long it takes jailers to process prisoners,” among other things, Berryhill said.

The next few phases will examine where the department needs to be in future years and what it needs to get there.

For example, the department only has one location, the public safety complex near Lynn Lane Road and Kenosha Street on the city’s north side. But the department’s coverage area goes out east to the Verdigris River, where there is significant population growth.

“At some point in time, there’s a good chance we’ll need to have a footprint out there. The study is going to help us identify what that looks like,” he said.

Berryhill added public input is paramount to that decision-making. “We can’t meet the needs of our customers if we don’t know what those needs are.” 

Broken Arrow residents are encouraged to take the brief, anonymous survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/B6CCYD3. The deadline to take the public survey is May 17.