Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office will review its contract with Estacada and the city is asking for more police coverage amid an increase in police activity in the area last year.
“We are planning for another deputy in September 2023 or March 2024, depending on when there is availability,” City Manager Melanie Wagner said.
The long wait is because it’s become difficult to hire and train officers.
“We’re fighting for qualified people,” Estacada Police Chief Marcus Mendoza told a meeting of Estacada’s Traffic & Public Safety Committee. It takes a year or so to train an officer, he added. There is a months long wait jut to get officers into training slots.
Estacada has three deputies covering the city, including a school resource officer assigned to Estacada High School. The SRO works on patrol when school is not in session.
When there is no coverage in Estacada deputies from the CCSO respond as they would in other parts of the county. When a deputy is on duty in Estacada, the response time for a Priority 1 or 2 call is about five minutes, Mendoza said, and up to 20 minutes when Estacada has no dedicated coverage.
“Estacada is the oldest contract” the CCSO has with a city, Mendoza said.
Mendoza spends 15% of his time as Estacada’s Police Chief and the rest of the time on other duties with the CCSO.
The contract with the CCSO allows Estacada to tap the speciality services of the sheriff’s office such as the canine unit, bomb squad, dive team, forensic sketch artists and crisis negotiators.
“We are going to be taking a look at that (the contract) this spring with the CCSO and the other contract cities,” Estacada’s Wagner said.
The city pays the sheriff’s office around $800,000 for law enforcement services and the review might increase the cost slightly, she said.
“The CCSO doesn’t plan to profit from the contract like a private business would, but we also need to make sure they are being compensated for the services they provide to the contract cities,” she added.
Also, some of the provisions of the contract have been unclear to Estacada officials.
“The Contract Oversight Committee will also be taking a broader look at the contact to make sure it is still relevant in the way it is written and observed,” Wagner said.
Police calls up
All this is happening as the deputies are busier than ever.
The deputies patrolling Estacada made 2,876 calls in 2022, up from the 2,799 they made in 2021. These are both calls initiated by the officers and the public.
Those that are classified as “crime” calls totaled 500 last year, down from 529 in 2021, according to statistics available on the CCSO’s relatively new call report dashboard, https://www.clackamas.us/sheriff/stats#.
In the crime category calls regarding theft or domestic violence are the most common type of call to summon the help of law enforcement.
Last year, there were 90 calls about thefts in Estacada, six more than in 2021.
Domestic violence prompted 80 calls last year, which was down from 109 domestic calls in 2021.
The biggest increase in crime calls was to report stolen vehicles. In 2022, 26 vehicles were stolen in the Estacada area, more than double the 11 stolen in 2021.
Calls classified as “disorder” calls for things such as shots fired, an unwanted person or suspicious activity totaled 1,077 in 2022, up from 944 in 2021.
Suspicious activity is by far the most frequent type of call the deputies make in Estacada, with 443 such calls in 2022, up from 423 in 2021. Calls about unwanted persons almost doubled to 49 in 2022 from 27 the year earlier.
A member of Estacada’s Traffic & Public Safety Committee citing a recent robbery at Ace Hardware said “this seems to be happening more often.”
Mendoza responded that reports don’t back up those perceptions. “I would say that more of a feeling than what is actual,” he said.
“Our crime statistics and our data, they don’t show a huge increase,” he added. “We’re not seeing a huge spike in crime.”