By Debby Woodin

dwoodin@joplinglobe.com

Thirty minutes west of Bend, Ore., Mount Bachelor rises into the sky, a beacon to snow skiers that there’s plenty of powder through June.

Below it, the Deschutes River draws rafters and fly fishermen, while nearby Smith Rock State Park attracts rock climbers from all over.

Bend has done what any place that can boast 300 days of sunshine a year could do: grow. The population has doubled to 70,000 in 15 years as people have arrived to work at resorts, restaurants and in shopping districts, or simply to vacation.

The nearby town of Redmond, only a few miles south of Bend in central Oregon, has begun to enjoy a little of the same.

“Our city has been growing at a 10 percent-plus rate for at least 10 years,” said Capt. Gary DeKorte, who is in charge at the Redmond Police Department. In 1995, the population there was 10,000. Now, it’s 25,000.

Those are the bustling communities that will give Joplin its next police chief, Lane J. Roberts. He will start the job April 23.

Customer service

If Bend and Redmond are any indicator, the Joplin department will be expected, under the guidance of the new chief, to provide a certain level of customer service and to address issues that underpin crime.

“Lane Roberts is to me, if I were to characterize him, the consummate professional,” said DeKorte, who worked for Roberts for seven years at the Redmond department. “He has very high standards, and he would expect us to achieve more. He brought our agency from one level up to another.”

Roberts was chief at Redmond from 1999 until last summer, when he left to take a job as director of the Deschutes 911 Service District.

DeKorte said he doesn’t know why Roberts would leave the 911 job after only about six months. He said Roberts has retuned the organization into a positive workplace.

“It was a huge undertaking, and it’s related to law enforcement,” DeKorte said, though it isn’t the police work that Roberts has pursued for 35 years. “There was a lot of turnover,” and Roberts seems to have made the place more tranquil and better able to retain its employees, DeKorte said.

“He brought morale up there,” DeKorte said, and Roberts did it while teaching a credo he has used constantly in his leadership role: “He believes that everybody is our customer, including our co-workers.”

Rooting out crime

Mayor Alan Unger said he was disappointed when Roberts left the Redmond police post last year.

“Lane did a great job when he came here,” Unger said. “Our department was smaller, and the town was small, 10,000 population, and we needed to grow professionally.”

With the town growing and in need of more city services, including police protection, Roberts established a method that helped administrators know when more police officers were needed, Unger said.

Roberts also taught the officers within the department to correct factors that lead to crime as quickly as they could.

“He came here and reoriented our police officers to work at the root causes of the problems, like family violence, rather than treating the symptoms every Friday night,” Unger said.

Roberts took the department’s professionalism up a notch by incorporating accreditation, something that the Joplin Police Department is undergoing.

“He worked on bringing Redmond up to a higher bar,” Unger said. “He instilled a greater sense of professionalism and accountability in our police officers.”

Police accreditation is something that Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr started pursuing after two Joplin police officers came under fire for arresting an 11-year-old boy at a school after the boy was involved in a flap with the son of one of the officers.

The Joplin Police Department has been working since that incident on accreditation through the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.

Keenan Cortez, co-chairman of the Joplin Police Department’s Civilian Advisory Committee, said he hopes the issue involving the boy is a thing of the past.

“I hope as a city and a department, we’ve moved on from that,” he said. “We’ve learned. We’re going to do things that won’t allow that kind of situation to happen again.”

Department diversity

Cortez said he has spoken with Roberts about the future of the department. Cortez said he hopes that in addition to accreditation and a focus on customer service, the department can start hiring more officers shortly after collection of a half-cent sales tax for public safety starts in April.

“I think citizens are really looking for the added force on the streets, the added police cars,” that the tax will bring, Cortez said.

Cortez said he hopes to see more diversity in the department when the hiring begins. He was chairman of a residents’ group that lobbied voters to pass the sales tax in November.

He said the department should work to maintain or raise its standards, and it shouldn’t hire everyone who applies.

“We can’t just hire 30 police officers overnight,” Cortez said. “We still have to pick the right candidates.”

He said the department needs diversity by hiring more minorities and women. “That’s on my agenda, increasing our minority and female presence,” Cortez said.

Plans call for the public-safety tax to finance more equipment, such as mobile data computers for police cars, and the installation of more streetlights in dark neighborhoods with high crime rates.

“Chief Roberts has definitely got his hands full,” Cortez said. “This is all going to be good for the city, good for the department and good for the citizens.”

The chief’s take

Roberts said he’s leaving the 911 job because he wants to be in the Joplin area to be available to his mother, who lives in the Jay, Okla., area. He had decided to move to this area before he was offered the Joplin job, but he was quickly sold on the opportunity Joplin offers, he said.

He said his philosophy on customer service by police is this: Government is the “ultimate monopoly,” taking people’s money upfront in the form of taxes, and it has the obligation to provide satisfactory service.

“That’s a tough sell because in law enforcement, we live in a confrontational world,” Roberts said.

It doesn’t mean, though, that police officers have to be soft.

“I’m not saying that you can make everybody happy” when issuing citations or making arrests, Roberts said.

He said that based on conversations he has had with Joplin residents, city officials and those who work in the Police Department, he believes his philosophy will be accepted in Joplin.

“There’s a recognition from the department that this is something they want to create,” Roberts said.

“It seems to me they have a need to create a customer-service image for the organization. That does not mean they haven’t been good customer-service providers in the past.”

As for leaving scenic central Oregon, Roberts said, “There are some scenic places in the Ozark Mountains too.”





On the personal side

Joplin’s new police chief, Lane J. Roberts, is married, and has three daughters and seven grandchildren.