Tempe police will accept an award Sunday for involving volunteers in their homeland security efforts.
The Tempe Police Department was the only winner selected from 148 entries in the homeland security category of the Community Policing Award Program.
The program is run by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and ITT Industries, a company that supplies night-vision equipment to the U.S. military and law enforcement agencies.
"[Y]our community is safer for using innovative community policing approaches to address terrorist threats," according to the award notification letter the department received.
The department will be recognized Sunday night at the IACP's annual conference in Miami Beach, Fla.
Assistant Police Chief Jay Spradling said Tempe received the award because of its programs to pre-train volunteers so they can assist in a disaster, and to manage untrained volunteers who respond to a disaster.
In its Assistance in Disaster program, the police department offers training and credentials to volunteers so they can be more quickly dispatched to assist police officers in an emergency.
"We have a group of volunteers that are ready to help us if we have a disaster," Spradling said.
He said the program came out of discussions he had with the police department's volunteer coordinator after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Volunteers take classes on subjects like evidence preservation, using police radios, understanding the management system police use in a disaster, and traffic and perimeter control.
"It's not rocket-science-type stuff," Spradling said. "But if we had a huge, huge plane crash where the scene was a couple of miles in diameter, that's a large perimeter we need to lock down and control."
He said one or two volunteers could be matched with a police officer to control a part of the perimeter.
Tempe currently has about 65 pre-trained AID volunteers, and Spradling said Mesa has a similar program with about 130 volunteers Tempe could call on in a disaster.
Some volunteers have already helped the department with missing-children investigations, Spradling said.
Also, most of Tempe's AID volunteers are a part of the department's Volunteers in Policing program, the organization that oversees all Police Department volunteers.
"We've got a whole spectrum of volunteers," Police Chief Ralph Tranter said.
He said people from many professions and backgrounds assist the police department with both direct service to the public and support service to the department.
"Our award was really based on us including volunteers into everything we do as a police department," Tranter said.
Spradling said Tempe's plans for a volunteer reporting center also factored into its winning the award.
In the event of a major disaster, the city has plans to set up a center away from the disaster site.
"If the big one happened in downtown Tempe, the last place we want all the volunteers to show up is downtown Tempe," he said.
The center would move pre-trained AID volunteers quickly to the front lines of the disaster. It would also catalog other citizens who want to help and the services they can provide.
"That will be put in a database that our incident commanders on scene will have access to," Spradling said.
He said Tempe or Mesa residents interested in volunteering can contact their police department's volunteer coordinator to find out when training will be offered.
"We're always looking for new AID volunteers," he said.
Reach the reporter at brian.indrelunas@asu.edu.
