What we don’t know: Nobody else locally surveys their police officers about their jobs

It came to everybody’s attention earlier this month that the local government in Albemarle County conducts a biennial – every two years – survey of its employees to try to identify areas where the various department heads can work to make internal improvements.

I surveyed other local governments in our area to try to see what they find from their own internal employee surveys.

Turns out: no one else, among those I reached out to, do this kind of thing.

I tried Charlottesville, UVA Police, Augusta County, Staunton and Waynesboro, and Harrisonburg and Rockingham County.

Nothing.

The motivation for me to seek this information was the reporting that we did on the results of an internal survey of employees at the Albemarle County Police Department from more than a year ago.

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ICYMI

• A year-old report highlighted concerns inside the ACPD: Why is this presented as breaking news?

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The ACPD employee survey was part of a bigger effort by county government to survey employees in its various departments.

I filed FOIA requests with the other local governments in our region to get a look at their work in this area.

What I was hoping to be able to do was paint a more complete picture than the one being drawn up by the Central Virginia chapter of the Police Benevolent Association, which, it seems to me, is trying to use the results from the ACPD portion of the survey of employees across the county government organization to exact petty, personalized revenge.

Even assuming the motivation behind this effort to take down Police Chief Sean Reeves is what it is, I think we could actually end up benefitting from the questions being asked, if we widen the scope of the inquiry to get as complete a picture of the situation involving the attitudes of police employees and civilian employees across the area as possible.

Basically, are the frustrations evident in the ACPD survey ACPD-specific, or representative of bigger issues across the board in policing – stemming from the low pay for officers and civilian employees that makes it hard for agencies to recruit and retain staff, leading to job openings that go unfilled for months or years, forcing longer hours for those left to pick up the slack, and cascading from there?

Now that we know other local governments don’t do what Albemarle County does to try to get feedback from its county employees, it would seem that we need to encourage the peers to follow the example set by Albemarle.

That’s a good step one.

And in the meantime, step two, the local police union, which said it planned to conduct its own survey of ACPD employees, might want to launch surveys of other area PDs and sheriff’s offices.

I can see where surveys across the board can give the union ammunition to use to lobby our local governments to boost pay, which in turn should help us attract potential recruits, retain good officers with experience, boost morale for all involved – and bottom line, keep our communities safer.

Or we can just make whatever this is about this police union taking down another local police chief, and leaving the problems of low pay, perpetually open jobs, longer hours and low morale to continue to fester across the region.