The City of Peoria will spend about $500,000 a year to hire six civilian community service officers aimed at boosting the police department’s daytime security presence downtown.
Police Chief Brad Dixon says these unarmed officers will assist with such public safety and community service matters as traffic control, monitoring parking decks, and crowd control during events.
“I just want to be clear that we’re not replacing officers. This isn’t affecting our hiring process,” said Dixon. “These are community service officers that, essentially they’re not sworn, but it will allow our police officers to focus on higher priority law enforcement calls.”
The Peoria City Council, with three absences, unanimously approved the hiring authorization and related budget adjustment during its regular meeting Tuesday.
“The city administration and the police administration have really noticed that there’s some gaps in downtown around public safety,” said City Manager Patrick Urich. “Looking at what a number of other communities have done to really extend the reach and have more eyes and ears on the streets, they’ve utilized this concept of a community service officer.”
Mayor Rita Ali joined several council members in voicing strong support for taking this approach, saying she wished the city had the capacity to hire as many as 10 civilian officers.
“Six, I think, is a great start, and I see these individuals as maybe potential pipeline members into the police force,” she said. “We have more people living in the downtown area than ever before, and that’s only going to increase with some of our housing projects.
“We need a downtown that is more walkable, and we are fighting with the perception of a downtown that is not safe. We know better than that, but we do have to do everything that we can to make it even safer.”
Dixon said the community service officer staffing will consist of two three-person shifts, one from 6 a.m.-2 p.m. and the second from 2-10 p.m. They will be confined to the downtown area, considered by the police department as running between the Murray Baker and Bob Michel bridges from the riverfront to Perry Avenue/William Kumpf Boulevard.
“There’s a different service needs during different times of the day,” said Dixon, suggesting the hours could be adjusted to handle events along the riverfront or at the Peoria Civic Center.
“When we have events at night, those would likely be staffed with some overtime. Depending on how we structure it, we could flex hours if we know there’s an event coming in. It gives us a lot of flexibility.”
Council member John Kelly questioned the rationale for using the community service officers during the daytime as opposed to overnight. Dixon said he did not want to have those officers working the bar district around closing time.
“That’s a police job, I want [patrol officers] dealing with that. That’s mainly fights and things like that,” said Dixon. “If you think about the business district and all the folks we have coming to work — parking, getting in.
“We have a lot of calls for service in our parking decks in the morning. We have some issues with our unhoused in the morning, and so we think that would be a good use of resources in the morning prior to everyone arriving.”
Urich said the city received positive feedback from the business community and consulted with the Greater Peoria Leadership Council about the concept of using the civilian officers.
“They were kind of coming at it from the same direction, and they’ve actually talked about privately funding some security for a period of time while we get this up and running,” said Urich, adding the GPLC will contribute $72,000 toward training and equipment costs.
Council member Tim Riggenbach called the civilian staffing idea “out of the box thinking,” though he kindly suggested the police department not refer to them as “CSO” to avoid any confusion with the public works department’s use of the same acronym for the combined sewer overflow projects.
“I know that the businesses and residents from the downtown area, being my district, they are very, very concerned at times with safety at certain times of the day and whatnot, and they are very supportive of this,” added District 2 council member Alex Carmona.
Council members Denis Cyr, Denise Jackson and Zach Oyler did not attend the meeting, while Kiran Velpula participated virtually.
