In an effort to increase efficiency in patrolling, the College Station Police Department will open an office on Northgate.
The office was made possible by a no-cost lease agreement with St. Mary’s Catholic Church and will be shared in a small one-story building in the Northgate District, said Marcel Lejeune, assistant director at St. Mary’s Church.
“The police have a patrol that’s regular, but they didn’t have a space to do the paperwork and be able to get a cup of coffee,” Lejeune said. “So now they do have a space to be able to do that. It’s going to make it more comfortable for the police and hopefully that means a safer environment for the community and for our students.”
Lt. Chuck Fleeger, public relations officer for the College Station Police Department, said the partnership with St. Mary’s is advantageous.
“It’s close to a very high call area, being the Northgate district,” Fleeger said.
He said the office will be a base of operations for the police officers where they can go to complete paperwork and process evidence for delivery to the police department. At this location, officers will be able to store bicycles and medical equipment and repair bicycles, Fleeger said.
“It won’t be like you can come into the police station where there’s 24 hours in a base week,” Fleeger said. “It’s going to be an area where [the officers] can go at the start of their shift and to go back in and do paperwork and put away their equipment for the day and the next day they start again.”
Having an office will both help students by enabling police officers to respond faster and make the jobs of the police officers patroling Northgate easier, Fleeger said.
“Currently the way it works is the police officers would go to the police department for their shift and respond from there,” said assistant chief Billy Couch of the College Station Police Department. “They would have to get a car, load up their equipment, including their bicycles, drive to the Northgate area, unload the bicycles, patrol and then at the end of the shift, load the bicycles back onto the car, and then drive over to the department where they would store the equipment.”
The remodeling will hopefully begin within the next week or two, Couch said, and will probably have three to four week turn around time on construction.
Josh Cook, senior psychology major, said he thought the office would bring more safety to the Northgate area, but hopes that it does not impart an agenda towards college students.
“I’ve seen some sketchy stuff on Northgate and I always feel reassured whenever I see police there,” Cook said. “Hopefully they’ll focus on important things like preventing sexual assault and drunk driving rather than just use it as a ticket mill for underage drinking and [people] not stopping at stop signs.”
Fleeger said the office is an opportunity that furthers the College Station Police Department’s role as civil servants.
“I think that any time we get the opportunity to partner with our community — in this particular case it’s going to be an opportunity to better perform our duties,” Fleeger said.