Police station opens with new gadgets

This morning, the Maricopa Police Department cut the ribbon on its new 32,200-square-foot police station at 18135 N. Park Plaza.

This facility is twice as large as the old building next door, which housed the MPD headquarters until next Wednesday.

“Can you believe it?” Mayor Nancy Smith asked the crowd of dozens of residents, dignitaries and city employees. “It was a little over 15 years ago that we hired our first police chief.”

Smith described the new facility as a “unique space” for dispatchers and police and touted it as being “built without debt.”

The old station, built in 2013, will fulfill two new functions.

“Half of it will be theater and half of it will be incubation space for new companies“- said Smith.

MPD Captain Stephen Judd reflected on how far the department has come.

“We were working in construction trailers that had been attached to look like offices and rooms,” Judd said of the department’s early days in 2007. “At that time, we were doing great as a department, with two administrative trailers, a trailer for property and evidence storage, a patrol trailer that I thought of as a holding facility, a report writing area and a break room. We handcuffed our guy to the bar next to where we wrote reports.”

After the speeches, Smith and Police Chief Mark Goodman cut the ribbon. Residents toured the building with police volunteers. It looked very different than last time InMaricopa reporters visited.

“I think one of my favorite things about the new station is being able to use our force simulator right here on site,” Goodman said.

This VIRTRA Simulatorwhich mentally prepares officers to use force, was located off the campus of Maricopa Central Arizona College. It has been moved to a separate room in the new station.

This was probably the most exciting part of the trip. Watch the video to see how it works Here.

“Now that everything is here, in the headquarters, in the building, we’ll have a lot more flexibility to come in and run some scenarios with our officers and then evaluate their performance, draw some conclusions and then go out into the field and apply those conclusions,” Goodman said.

The new station also has a checkpoint, giving officers a place to thoroughly search vehicles that are off the street or in a parking lot.

“If we need to process evidence in a vehicle, we can bring it into our secure facility,” Goodman said. “It’s air-conditioned, so we can spend our time looking for evidence in the vehicle.”

Police employees will be moving to new station on Wednesday and ThursdayGoodman said he hopes 911 dispatchers will be moved to the new headquarters at the station in September, but said “Motorola is having some delays with deliveries,” so an exact date has not been set.

“We’re bringing in brand new, state-of-the-art dispatch stations for our guys,” Goodman said. “As soon as we get them here, we’re going to be really excited because I won’t have to drive down to (the Copper Sky substation) to talk to our dispatchers anymore.”

Goodman said it’s important that all the pieces of the MPD puzzle are connected because “without our dispatchers, records, property and evidence people, we wouldn’t be able to function.”

“This is a huge milestone, not only for the department but for the city,” Goodman said. “The difference is huge and incredible, and we’re really excited to start this new chapter that will allow us to serve the community even better than we have done before.”