BILLINGS — Wait times for non-urgent police calls have gone down in the past six months after Billings police launched a new team of civilian officers.
Newly appointed Community Service Officers may now be the people showing up when you call for certain types of service in Billings.
“These guys are responding the same day, sometimes within minutes, cuz the call is coming in, it's not holding,” said Lt. Matt Lennick, BPD spokesman and one of the commanders who developed the program.
Kevin Rockwell was a Billings police officer for six and a half years and now serving as a CSO.
“Most of the calls that we deal with are no suspect calls, cold vandalisms, thefts, we’ll help out with traffic on accidents and stuff like that,” Rockwell said.
They’re collecting evidence and writing reports to hand off to sworn police officers.
Four CSOs kicked off the program in January, tackling a long-standing issue with long wait times for some calls for service.
People in the past have waited days, even weeks for an officer to come take a report on these types of calls.
“It just frees up the patrol officers to respond to active calls. So all around, the response times are getting better, for people that have cold calls, to people that have active calls,” Rockwell said.
The idea for the effort came after a study two years ago at the department found that certain types of calls could be handled in a better way.
“Either we were tying up patrol offices that should have been out doing either proactive patrol or responding to in-progress stuff, or we were having extended wait periods where the public was waiting much longer than they should have been to report those cold crimes. when you wait that long, your solvability factors decrease,” Lennick said.
The positions are funded through the public safety mill levy approved by voters in 2021.
The first four CSOs started taking calls in January and have responded to 2029 calls for service
And 700 case reports.
“That's a pretty high call volume when you’re talking just four officers,” Lennick said.
CSOs are currently out from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
The department is in the process of hiring the remaining three positions funded by the levy to have community service officers available seven days a week.
