ES officers’ long guns to remain in vehicles

A proposed ordinance aimed at having long firearms and munitions stored at the Eureka Springs Police Department instead of in officers’ vehicles failed to gain any traction with the Eureka Springs City Council.

City council member Harry Meyer said at the council’s regular meeting on Monday, Oct. 23, at The Auditorium, that he feels long firearms should be locked up at the police station when an officer is not on duty, but his motion died when it failed to get a second.

“Since they have had trouble in other departments with long weapons disappearing and the fact that somebody who’s on the force that lives on the other side of Holiday Island ain’t going to make it here in 10 minutes anyway, I think the best thing to do is to keep all this stuff at the police department, keep it locked up,” Meyer said. “… We’ve got two cops on duty all the time. There’s some around that can go get a weapon. Now, if he’s in his patrol car, he can carry the gun while he’s patrolling the street. But if he’s at home, he doesn’t need to have those weapons.”

Outgoing police chief Brian Young, however, told council members that each gun is sighted for the officer who uses it and storing the guns at the police station would slow down response time.

“That officer sights it in for him because they have optics on them,” Young said. “Not everyone has the same eyes. … So, those rifles are done for that person and that person only. That officer is responsible for anything that’s wrong with that firearm.”

City council member Autumn Slane asked if there was room at the police station to store the weapons when they weren’t being used.

“We could lock them in a safe, but we’d have to get more safes,” Young said. “But then every time one of them went to get them out, because they all look the same, they’d have to go through and read serial numbers off of every single one trying to find which one is theirs. …The difference is serial numbers. Other than that, they’re all the same.”

The process Meyer was proposing would greatly increase the time it would take for an officer to get to the scene of a crime, Young said.

“If this ordinance was passed and officers had to leave home to respond to a situation, come to the police department, open a safe, make sure that they’re getting the right weapon, just an average, how long is that going to increase response time?” council member David Avanzino asked Young.

“A lot,” Young responded. “Because the officers won’t have access to that safe. An armorer would have to have access for that. … Someone has to be responsible for it. In this scenario, you can see the chain of custody.”

Avanzino then asked: “So by passing this ordinance, we are putting life and limb in jeopardy?”

“Yeah, you’re talking umpteen … I mean, there’s no telling because if an armorer wasn’t there to get them access to it, it could be 45 minutes before someone could get there to open that up for them,” Young said.

“If they have it with them, if they’re called out, they have it and they immediately go to the scene. That’s the reason why we have it the way we do.” Council member Melissa Greene said she understood where Meyer’s thoughts were on the issue, but added: “God forbid, anything bad happen, we would need that gun immediately.”

“We haven’t had anything,” Young said. “But we have to be prepared for the worst and hope for the best.”

Meyer said with the low crime rate in Eureka Springs he was surprised to find out that each officer carries a long gun.

“We have no violent crime here,” Meyer said. “I was shocked when I found out that every officer has a long gun and a shotgun. I figured they had pistols. Why going so far? It’s like we’re militarizing our police force.”

What the department is doing is working, Young replied.

“There’s a reason we haven’t had a lot of violent crime here, and we want to keep it that way,” Young said. “Our officers are prepared for that and the public knows that. Our officers are prepared. We don’t want people to come to town … and feel unsafe.”

During council member comments at the end of the meeting, Meyer explained more his reasoning for bringing up the gun issue.

“Well, I’m sure everyone thinks that I am anti-police, but I’m not,” Meyer said. “It’s just that we’ve got all the guns, lots of weapons, lots of cars. There’s six cars sitting up there at the police department and some of them look like they’ve been through a demolition derby, whole sides caved in, and I’m sure they’ll be sold at auction. But, you know, we’re just spending too much money on our little city police department. You can say that we are busy on weekends, but then during the week, how come they don’t find out that somebody broke into the public restrooms and trashed them? They don’t even check doors. They don’t check a thing. They just drive around town. If they drive around town at all.

“I mean we used to have officers walk Spring Street at night checking people’s doors. That was with the previous police chief. But we don’t have that now. And, you know, I’m not expecting them to catch anybody in the act of tearing up one of our public restrooms. But I guarantee they should be able to tell us between what hours of the night it happened, because they should be checking that stuff. From what I understand about how much money we spend on uniforms and shoes. We’ve got a class … we got the top-notch police department for a little town of 2,200 people that has damn near zero crime. That’s my take on it.”