By Jenna Buzzacco-Foerster, Naples Daily News
Original publication date:  June 26, 2011

Naples, Fla. — Naples police Chief Tom Weschler was ready for a fight.

He knew City Council would frown at some of his fiscal 2011-12 budget requests.

But Weschler said recently he never expected to have to go to bat over something he deems an essential tool of the trade: portable police radios.

“I was surprised,” Weschler said. “Each one of those requests has a department ranking, and you’ll note (police radios) were No. 1 and No. 2 on our list.”

Weschler earlier this month requested $48,000 a year for the next five years for portable radios. That sum would buy about 15 radios a year, “thereby maintaining a reasonable level of quality public safety radio communications,” his request stated.

Weschler requested an additional $13,000 in fiscal 2011-12 to replace mobile radios in police cars. The money would be the last phase of a six-year replacement plan.

But council members took issue with the costs, and some said they didn’t know whether it was financially viable for the department to continue to give each officer his or her own radio.

While council members didn’t outright deny the request, they did ask that Weschler come up with other alternatives – particularly officers sharing the radios – before the budget comes back for final adoption.

“I don’t know how many radios we bought in the last six years,” Councilman Gary Price said during the June 13 council meeting. “I don’t think we have the financial ability to spend in this department like we have (in the past). … I don’t know how we can afford a radio for every officer.”

Southwest Florida law enforcement officials recently said asking officers to share radios is like having an unreliable cellphone: There’s no guarantee it will be ready to use when you need it most.

“It’s the most valuable piece of equipment they have,” said Tim Day, director of the Southwest Institute for Public Service. “All of us have had bad communications. And at the end of the day, you have to trust your police chief that he doesn’t want to spend money frivolously.”

Day, a former police officer and onetime Cape Coral City Council member, said sharing equipment is a “horrendous idea.”

“Equipment in this profession, honestly whether it’s vehicles or whether it’s their radios, lasts longer when you have one person taking care of it,” Day said. “What would you do if you handed off a radio at the end of the shift, and the battery wasn’t working? When you put a name on it, it’s the (person’s) responsibility.”

Naples isn’t the only law enforcement agency that assigns each officer his or her own radio. Deputies with the Collier County Sheriff’s Office and Lee County Sheriff’s Office are assigned their own portable radios, officials said recently.

“In our opinion, logistically and operationally it makes sense for an officer to have an assigned radio and we believe it is a small price to pay for officer safety,” Lee County Chief Deputy Rob Homan said in an email.

Greg Smith, the Collier sheriff’s chief of administration, agrees. Smith said the office hasn’t looked into whether deputies could share radios.

Collier County’s replacement plan requires radios be replaced at the six-year mark. The county follows guidelines set by the state’s Department of Management Services, but Smith said with budgetary constraints in recent years the county has been “trying to get a little more serviceability” out of them by keeping the radios a bit longer.

The county also isn’t replacing as many radios a year as it once did.

Still, Smith said $48,000 a year – or about $240,000 over five years – isn’t a bad deal, considering the county budgeted $180,000 in fiscal 2011 for all radio repairs.

Collier County government spent about $396,000 on radios in fiscal 2010.

Weschler said it’s important to know that the portable radios, which run about $3,200 per radio, aren’t the same type of police radio residents can pick up at an electronics store.

Instead, the radios have several frequencies for communication and are programmed with an emergency button an officer can push if he can’t radio back for help.

Once an officer hits the button, the city’s communications center is informed of who may be in distress. That speeds up the response time, and gives dispatchers a clearer picture of what could be happening.

Councilman Sam Saad said he thought Weschler could have done a better job of explaining that feature during the City Council meeting earlier this month. Saad said knowing that feature is there makes him feel “very comfortable with the decision” not to cut funding.

Price, however, still isn’t completely comfortable with the cost.

He said he plans to have a conversation with Weschler about all of the features so he can better understand the needs of the department.

“It always defaults in to (that) our guys aren’t going to be safe,” Price said last week. “Every year we’re buying radios. I’m just trying to look for common-sense solutions.”

Day said he believes the best solution is to take the chief’s recommendation to heart.

“It’s for the public safety and for the officer’s safety. We don’t hand them off like a piece of equipment that doesn’t matter. They need to be taken care of because they do matter,” Day said.

“My alternative is there wouldn’t be any other alternative.” 

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