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FARMINGTON — The Farmington Police Department's old shift schedules weren't really working out.
Chief Eric Johnsen said officers started shifts at a variety of times in an effort to have as many officers on the streets as possible. But not only did this cause difficulty when officers needed time off, it also interfered with important trainings, since on-duty officers would often miss much if not all of the proceedings, he said.
The bottom line, Johnsen said, is the department only has so many officers.
"All you're doing is playing a chess game," he said. "You're just having to constantly shuffle the schedule and it quite honestly becomes a scheduling management nightmare."
That's why, at the start of the year, Johnsen implemented new shift and training schedules, which he said will ultimately benefit the community.
The department now has three different shifts, Johnsen said: day, graveyard and swing. Officers on the "A Side" rotation work Saturday to Tuesday, and those on the "B Side" rotation work Tuesday to Friday. Every two weeks, the rotations swap.
The changes allow officers on duty to focus on their work, while officers assigned to training can focus on learning or teaching skills without getting pulled away, Johnsen said.
The changes also mean that there are more hands on deck on Tuesdays, allowing the department to tackle projects that they previously didn't have time for, Johnsen said.
"This is our second month into it ... and it's already proving to be an incredible morale build. The guys love it," he said.
The Farmington Police Department also recently introduced one more new element to their squad: Snoop the dog. Johnsen said the black-and-white Bernedoodle is the department's unofficial emotional support dog, available for the officers to pet or play with after responding to rough calls.
"Far too often, we forget there's a human being involved in that that didn't ask to be involved in that, and that's the police officer. And he has to somehow deal with that. What do you do with that?" Johnsen told KSL-TV in December.
Johnsen mentioned Snoop and the department's scheduling changes in a recent post shared on Farmington's city Facebook page. In the same post, he wrote that, during the first quarter of 2022, Farmington police officers responded to four residential burglaries, 29 vehicle burglaries and 10 vehicle thefts.
In an interview, Johnsen said it's too early to say how first-quarter 2023 numbers will compare, but anecdotally, he believes they'll be "well under" last year's burglary numbers.
He said his department sees more vehicle thefts in winter because people sometimes leave their cars running to warm up while they run back inside their homes.
"We don't get a lot of vehicle burglaries on Friday or Saturday nights because people tend to be coming home from being out and about," Johnsen said. "On a weeknight, they're generally not doing that, so weeknights are a little higher in statistics for those types of crimes."
