KENT, Wash. — Crime is overall down in the city of Kent compared to the last few years, despite having a staffing shortage in the city's police department.
Currently, the department has a staff of just over 160. Their goal is to get 180 employers, even though police chief Rafael Padilla said that is it still pretty conservative compared to other departments in the area.
Two years ago, staffing at the Kent Police Department was just in the double digits.
Padilla said the department has seen great support from the city, but the lack in funding and difficulty finding the best candidates for the job has contributed to the shortage issue.
"There's a little bit of a negative stigma that's out there right now and so we have to go and work really hard just to fill the spots we have," Padilla said. "We run pretty lean, and we have to do things smarter here."
The role of police officers has also changed overtime across the nation as police respond to more and more mental health crisis calls.
For this reason, Chief Padilla hopes to develop crisis response teams, which would pair officers with mental health professionals and caseworkers in the field.
"If you go back five or six years ago, law enforcement wasn't the 'fix it' for mental health crises. Law enforcement didn't have to manage the homeless population," he said. "It has become a huge impact on our staffing and those numbers aren't reflected in crime stats."
Violent crimes likes homicides and shootings are down in Kent, even though police expect robberies will actually be up by the end of the year.
However overall, from 2017 to 2018 violent crime went down 5 percent.
Property crime has also seen improvement for the most part with the exception of commercial burglary.
From 2017 to 2018 property crime went down 11 percent.
"I'd like to see a greater presence where we can be preventative instead of just proactive," said Padilla.
As Kent continues to grow, Padilla said KPD is taking a very aggressive approach to recruitment.
"If you are a lateral officer and you come to our department, there's a $10,000 allowance for an incentive for coming to work for us," he said. "For new recruit, officers that don't have prior experience... we provide them with a training incentive and they get to pick training basically of their choice," Padilla continued.
"The name of the game for us is we have to reach the best candidates first so we have modified all aspects of our recruiting and hiring so that we are as efficient and quick to make a decision in hiring somebody as we can be."