Federal Way will hire more police officers

Federal Way will hire more police to patrol the city.

This week, the Federal Way Police Department was awarded a grant of $807,345 from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. The new grant will fill three positions that were originally frozen as a result of budget projections, bringing the total number of commissioned Federal Way police officers to 129.

Coupled with a $1.03 million COPS grant in 2010, the money will help the police department fill a total of seven vacant officer positions.

“This grant came at a very important time for us and enables us to continue our proactive community based policing program,” said Chief Brian Wilson in a prepared statement.

The police department applied for the grant money, which covers an officer’s salary for three years. The grant also requires Federal Way to fund each position for an additional year. With the 2011 grant, for example, the department will fund three new officers through 2015.

The department hopes to enroll these new hires into the police academy by the beginning of 2012, said spokeswoman Cathy Schrock.

For more than a year, the police department has not filled officer vacancies due to projected budget shortfalls. The department has scaled back the number of specialized positions, such as traffic enforcement and criminal intelligence, and assigned those officers to patrol the streets.

The grant money will allow the department to re-establish those specialized positions once the new officers are trained and ready to patrol Federal Way’s streets, Schrock said.

 

Contact Federal Way Mirror Editor Andy Hobbs at editor@fedwaymirror.com or 1-253-925-5565 (ext 5050).

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