Transcript
Alan Creech
Police Chief, Nampa, Idaho
My philosophy has been that the police department is to mirror the community. When I became the Assistant Chief, we had no Hispanic officers. We had some bilingual Hispanic civilians and I kept asking, "Why don't we have bilingual people, why don't we have Hispanics?" The common response I got was, "We can't get the good people to apply." And so we started really trying to change the texture of our department, because what happens is that young men come up here, and our officers do not understand their culture. They don't understand what it's like to be a young Mexican male, and driving is usually the first thing that brings them to our attention. I was one of the chiefs in the state this last year that supported a bill to allow illegal aliens to obtain drivers' licenses. It was a very practical bill to me because what happens is that they get here, they don't have drivers' licenses, they can't get insurance, they don't understand the rules and we end up cross hairs of them and it starts a cycle that is hard to stop. So what we try to do at our department, and I think it is working for us, is we try to aggressively hire diversity, not just Hispanics. We have 16 female officers now for instance so that we can understand that side of the culture. But we still have a lot of work to do. I was going to comment on education. I spent quite a bit of time recently researching crime prevention and particularly juvenile delinquency. Research has clearly shown that the competency development will prevent crime and no matter how we teach it, if we can get kids to read and write and understand those competencies, their chances of being involved in crime are less. So in our department, we are heavily involved in programs at school districts, things that I could never dream police would be involved in, because we believe firmly that that will determine crimes, and we won't have to deal with them in a negative basis in the first place.
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