Syracuse, NY - Central New York’s two biggest police agencies would combine their training academies under a proposal expected to save at least $80,000 per year. The Syracuse Police Department and Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office would merge their training academies into one facility in downtown Syracuse, according to an 18-page proposal issued two weeks ago. The sheriff’s office would abandon...
Syracuse, NY - Central New York’s two biggest police agencies would combine their training academies under a proposal expected to save at least $80,000 per year.
The Syracuse Police Department and Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office would merge their training academies into one facility in downtown Syracuse, according to an 18-page proposal issued two weeks ago.
The sheriff’s office would abandon its 35-year presence at Onondaga Community College, although OCC would continue to offer college credit courses in police training to students who have not yet been hired by a police agency.
But the sheriff’s office would no longer pay $80,000 a year to OCC to rent facilities for the academy. Without that funding, OCC would no longer be able to host the training center, spokeswoman Amy Kremenek said.
Syracuse police and the sheriff’s office ran a combined training academy at OCC for 19 years. That ended in 1994, when the city pulled out over a dispute over which agency was in charge, and the city’s concern over having professors and not police officers teaching courses.
The combined academy could provide the best instructors from each agency, the proposal says.
“By pooling instructors in one academy, all recruits will have access to the very best instructors the region has to offer,” the document says.
Under the proposal, both Syracuse police and the sheriff’s office would run the academy. Syracuse Police Chief Frank Fowler and Sheriff Kevin Walsh met last week to go over details, they said. Both are on board so far, Walsh said.
Saving money by eliminating duplicate services wouldn’t be the only benefit, Fowler said.
“You get to share resources and ideas,” he said. “It’s going to make us all better.”
The proposal was the result of Onondaga County Executive Joanie Mahoney’s call for the two agencies to look for a more efficient way of training police, according to Patrick Kilmartin, a county legislator who in March got a resolution passed to get the sheriff’s office out of the training business. But that would’ve required Mahoney’s approval. Instead, she got the two agencies talking about consolidation.
Kilmartin proposed his resolution in response to a story in The Post-Standard last year that examined the overtime costs at the sheriff’s academy. The $80,000 savings cited in the proposal is just “low-hanging fruit” compared to the total savings of a combined academy, he said.
The savings would come by freeing up some full-time instructors that each agency has assigned to their academies, Kilmartin said. By assigning those officers to policing jobs, the agencies could reduce overtime costs, he said.
Walsh said he already started reducing costs at his academy over the past two years by getting police officers from other agencies to teach courses. That will continue in the proposed combined academy, he said.
The combined academy could eventually draw trainees from across the region, and the center’s revenues could be high enough to offset all of its expenses, Fowler said.
Kilmartin said the combined academy could be running by January, if not sooner.
“It just makes common sense,” Fowler said. “We found not only that it was practical, but it was absolutely the right thing to do in this world of shrinking resources and crime trends changing as fast as they do.”
Contact John O’Brien at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.