A consulting firm recommended consolidating the Los Gatos Monte Sereno Police Department’s offerings into one building and continuing recruitment of “diverse candidates” as part of an assessment of the department’s operations and services this year.
The town of Los Gatos authorized an agreement in January not to exceed $80,000 for Meliora Public Safety Consulting to conduct an organizational assessment of the police department. After working since January on the assessment using strategies like focus groups, community meetings and interviews, consultants said department staff is committed to its public safety mission and that the department demonstrated “positive momentum.”
Police chief Jamie Field commissioned the study to prime the department to potentially move its operations to either its headquarters at the town’s civic center or the police operations center on Los Gatos Boulevard.
“A space assessment would identify the ideal types and amounts of space needed to support the organization, staffing and programs” within the police operations center, she said in the January staff report.
Field presented the report to the town council at its Dec. 3 meeting. The potential consolidation comes as the town of Los Gatos is projected to face a budget deficit in the coming years, despite managing to balance the budget this year. The department has also continued to face chronic understaffing, continuing to stay below the 39 positions budgeted for, according to Field’s most recent report to the council in August.
“The quality of policing services in a smaller community partially comes from the police department being housed in one building, not miles apart,” the staff report on the agenda item reads. “The current two-building model is not conducive to communication, organizational alignment, a unified team or access for needs by the community which may require them currently to have to go between two buildings.”
Meliora’s 300-plus-page report breaks down the methodology the firm followed to conduct its assessment, and the five themes that arose in the study, including the department’s organizational structure, police facility, roles and responsibilities, risk management and reliability and process improvement.
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The report also includes 130 recommendations for the department that range from providing each officer with their own first aid kit to mitigating the department’s workload by exploring the use of artificial intelligence to write reports.
“This is an area that LGMSPD may wish to explore to determine if the technology is a good fit for the organization and assists in solving some of the report writing concerns highlighted in this report,” the report reads.
Field said during the council meeting that the department has begun work on implementing the recommendations, and as of Dec. 3 had completed about 14. The department designated roughly 21 recommendations as in progress, 45 as short-term goals, 29 as long-term goals that would take more than six months to complete and 21 as not a priority.
Mayor Mary Badame congratulated Field on Meliora’s assessment during the council meeting.
“It was clear that the Los Gatos Monte Sereno Police Department was to be commended; it was stated more than once in the report,” Badame said. “So hats off; we’re very proud of our police department.”
