The Wright City Police Department received a grant from the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services to hire three additional officers. 

The grant, for over $340,000, will cover 60% of the salaries and benefits packages of two new patrol officers and a new detective for four years, according to Lieutenant Aaron Sutton. The department will shoulder the rest of the cost.

“Our intention is to beef up our detective bureau by adding an extra person in there and then also hiring two more patrol officers to offset the busier times,” said Sutton. 

Before the grant, the Wright City Police Department employed 14 officers, including two school resource officers and one detective, Lt. Sutton and Police Chief Tom Canavan. 

Sutton also said while the grant will cover 60% of salary and benefit costs for those new officers for the next four years, they expect city revenues to increase enough to afford the new officers when the grant expires. 

“Our projected growth over the next five years should be enough to more than fund those officers and get us full funding for other officers,” said Sutton. “Those three officers, putting them in staffing now, will put us basically at the industry standard for what our personnel should be right now.”

The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was established through the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act and provides grants to local law enforcement agencies to “increase their community policing capacity and crime prevention efforts,” according to their website. 

Sutton did say since they recently received grant approval, he was unsure when they would be able to fill those positions. 

“At this point we haven’t set up a time, or process or recruiting efforts,” said Sutton, although they are in the works. 

He went on to say that in the past they have been fortunate to fill vacancies quickly and he was optimistic that they would be able to do the same with these new positions. 

“We’ve been very lucky to be fully staffed for the last year, and whatever positions or vacancies that have come open we’ve been able to fill rapidly,” said Sutton. “And most of those have been through previous employees that we were already familiar with and that were eligible for rehire, so I’m interested to see what kind of applicant pool we get.”

Sutton said the department also received a grant from Wal-Mart for $1,500 to purchase new digital cameras for evidence collecting. 

“The cameras that we have had are dated, and some of them aren’t even functioning, so it’s kind of a godsend to get that,” said Sutton.