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Emmi Harlan | Northern Star
While a new building is in the works for the DeKalb Police Department, it is still functioning out of the DeKalb Municipal Building at 200 South Fourth street.
Officers feeling effects of overcrowded police station
Lt. Carl Leoni, head of the patrol division for the DeKalb Police Department, said he often feels cramped in his office.
He shares a desk with the patrol sergeant and also has six file cabinets in the room. Leoni also can’t use the office to talk to civilians because there is no room in the office for extra people. The condition of the office is deteriorated, and plastic has been put on the wall that is crumbling.
“It is hard to do the job the way the job is supposed to be done with the conditions of the building,” he said.
Because of the overcrowding, the department has transformed what was previously a women’s jail cell into a communication office and put cubicles in rooms designed for conference rooms.
History
Since the DeKalb Police Department was built in 1968, the staff has more than doubled. The size of the building hasn’t.
In 1968, there were 30 sworn officers and eight civilian employees. The department now staffs 63 sworn officers and 19 civilians.
After 40 years, the space constraints of the 17,500-square-foot building at 200 S. Fourth St. have caused the department to work inefficiently and improvise with room usage.
The station is located on the first floor of the DeKalb Municipal Building, with city municipal offices on the second floor.
“We outgrew this station years ago,” said DeKalb Police Lt. Gary Spangler, head of investigations.
DeKalb Police Chief Bill Feithen said the ideal station would be about 56,500 square feet and may be built in the 800 block of West Lincoln Highway on the south side of the intersection with Carroll Avenue. This station would meet both current and future needs.
Options for funds that have been discussed include raising property taxes, increasing fines and raising the restaurant and bar tax, Feithen said.
Ideal Improvements
“Certainly as time goes on, we get busier and busier. So the problems become more frequent,” Spangler said. “The same problems we had 20 years ago occur today. They just occur more often.”
The increased number of staff and calls since the station’s construction has made managing space a common problem for Spangler, who said during major cases he spends a great deal of time managing the building and trying to find room for witnesses and suspects.
The station does not have a separate area for prisoners to bond out, which requires them to be walked past the secretarial and record keeping staff and through the lobby where victims or witnesses could be, Feithen said. The secretarial staff being located in the center of the station also leads to disruptions to their work, he added.
“It’s not a good mix,” Feithen said.
Currently the department has two interview rooms with similar furnishings, ideally to have separate interview rooms for suspects and victims or witnesses, Feithen said.
An interview room for suspects, or a “hard room,” would have more secure furnishings, as opposed to a “soft room” for victims or witnesses which would be more welcoming and comfortable to the person, Feithen said.
Because 75 percent of calls are north of railroad tracks that run east and west through the city, the ideal station would be built on the north side of the tracks, Feithen said. With about 80 trains passing through town per day, Feithen estimates there is traffic on the tracks about five to six hours each day, making it difficult if officers need to respond while a train is passing through.
The new station would also need to make room for three additional dispatch consoles that the current dispatch room does not have space for, Feithen said.
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