Kent Police will beef up security measures around its headquarters with a glass ballistic barrier at a nearby parking garage to help protect officers.
“We really haven’t done anything to address security around the police station since it opened in the early ’90s,” said Police Chief Ken Thomas. “In today’s day and age, we are seeing throughout the country attacks on the police or ambushes on the police around police stations.”
The shooting deaths of three officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., and five officers on July 7 in Dallas, Texas, are the latest attacks, but other strikes also have occurred over the years.
“The timing is appropriate because of Dallas, but we had started this process a couple of years ago and it has taken us a little bit of time to identify the right stuff and be able to move forward,” Thomas said last week.
Crews will install laminated glass as a ballistic barrier on the second and third floors of the west side of the city’s Centennial Center garage to help protect police who work at a building next to and below the garage, which sits east of City Hall.
A ballistic barrier on the garage floors would deter and prevent an attacker from shooting or throwing objects from the upper levels of the garage, according to a police staff report. The laminated glass disrupts and deflects bullets.
The project will cost about $115,000 for the glass, third-floor steel stiffeners, plans, engineering, permits, painting and tax, according to city documents.
The city will pay for the project with money from the school zone traffic camera fund, which catches speeders and has brought in more than $1.5 million to Kent since cameras were installed at two elementary schools in 2014. Cameras are now at four elementary schools.
The City Council approved the project at its Tuesday meeting. The proposal previously went before the council’s Operations and Public Safety committees.
“We’re in 2016 and we’re still operating the police department under security measures of 1993,” Thomas said. “To a degree, we have to progress as an organization and agency to beef up security and do the best we can. It’s a sign of the times and that’s the way police departments are designed and built in this day and age. We are trying to upgrade a very outdated facility.”
There has been an average of 9.5 line-of-duty deaths due to ambushes of police officers across the nation since 2000, according to city documents. Some of the attacks were directed at officers right outside of their department headquarters.
Kent voters turned down a property tax increase measure in 2014 to fund a new police headquarters, which would have included new security measures.
“Things got put on hold pending the outcome of that vote,” Thomas said. “Once it didn’t pass, we started moving forward quickly, but projects like this take time.”
Thomas said he hopes to have the new barriers in place as soon as possible.
“We need to tighten up security and ensure our employees are kept as safe as they possibly can be around the headquarters building,” he said.
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