2024 could bring new ranks for several of Lansdale’s finest.
Council has taken up talks on a series of promotions for the Lansdale Police Department, including one new rank and two bumps up for current officers.
"We’ve talked before about how the department is growing, to a point where it needs two lieutenants: one will be a patrol lieutenant — the community service department, the co-responder, the folks in uniform. The other would be more of an administrative lieutenant,” said public safety committee chairwoman Meg Currie Teoh.
Since a series of senior officer retirements and promotions in 2017, the department has operated with a senior officer structure led by police Chief Mike Trail, police Lieutenant Ryan Devlin as second-in-command, and head of the department’s accreditation process first secured in 2022, and overseen by that lieutenant are the department’s community service unit, criminal investigations unit, and patrol division, where a series of sergeants lead squads of officers on the street. Those ranks have grown considerably since the last changes to administration, with three new officers sworn in in February 2023 and a fourth in July, after lengthy talks on the department’s staffing levels and whether they’ve kept up with population growth.
According to Trail and Teoh, police are planning to change the top of that structure in 2024, promoting a current sergeant into a newly created lieutenant position that would handle administrative responsibilities for the department.
"This would include staffing, management, and training, and keeping up with the massive requirements that come with being an accredited department,” she said.
Council’s public safety committee has voted ahead that promotion, for one sergeant to lieutenant, which would create one vacancy at the sergeant level for the department, according to Teoh and Trail. Instead of just one promotion to sergeant, the department is recommending council consider two promotions to sergeant now, for several reasons. .
"We are currently paying seven sergeants, because we have an officer-in-charge of that unit, who is making a sergeant’s pay by acting as a sergeant — so we have seven sergeants acting as such,” Teoh said.
"That will resolve itself when that officer comes back from (medical) leave in May, and another sergeant we expect to be retiring in the fall, by which point we would then need to open the civil service (process) to replace that sergeant,” she said.
Activating the borough’s civil service commission to develop a candidate list and test officers for promotions typically costs about $12,000 each time it’s done, Teoh said, but approving the promotions now can be done while using an older but still active list that expires in December.
"If we move up two officers to sergeant now, that will only cost us the six month’s worth of pay; that is $6,000. So there’s a $6,000 savings by doing it this way,” she said.
"That seemed to make sense to us, so we decided to move that ahead, a recommendation to full council to promote two officers. Two solid folks on the list there, so we’re feeling good about that,” Teoh said.
As of now, Trail added, police are still having internal discussions about which of the lieutenant positions would be filled by Devlin, and which would be filled by a promoted sergeant, the number of which last officially changed when two officers were promoted to that rank in February 2022.
"We technically, on paper, have six sergeant positions, but we’re paying seven right now, because the one is out and we have to pay the other one. Part of this rationale to promote a second sergeant is to just pay that guy or gal,” Trail said.
With the public safety committee’s vote ahead, full council could then approve the promotions at an upcoming meeting, Teoh told the group. The councilwoman also gave an update on the department’s "very busy” new mental health co-responder program, which started in August with a partnership between police and Merakey, a local nonprofit that aims to provide mental health services and referrals to those in need of help police can’t provide.
"One of the challenges that we continue to encounter is that the police department has one data collection system, and Merakey has another. There’s a lot of communication challenges between the two systems,” Teoh said.
Police are working with Merakey on how to work through or around those communication issues, and the borough’s co-responder has recently attended a training session in Philadelphia to learn about similar efforts there. The department and committee have also begun talks on other ways the program could expand the services the co-responder provides to those in need, and the populations that could be served.
"The longer this program goes on, the more we see potential for how much more it could do. Conversations are happening, hopefully some exciting news in the future,” she said.
Lansdale’s borough council next meets at 7 p.m. on Nov. 15 and the public safety committee next meets at 6:30 p.m. on Dec. 6, both at the borough municipal building, 1 Vine Street. For more information visit www.Lansdale.org.
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