Chief Joe Sullivan was hired to lead the Wichita Police Department last December at a challenging time for the agency. He talked with KMUW’s Kylie Cameron about the past year and his plans for the year ahead.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
You’re one year into leading the Wichita Police Department, how has that gone so far?
I think overall, it's going well. I'm proud of what we’ve got accomplished. Obviously, we have a long way to go. But I would say in one year, we've brought the department very far. I’m very fortunate to have very hard working people at all ranks within the Wichita Police Department. As everyone knows, we're very short handed, but the officers on the street, the detectives, and commanders and supervisors are getting the job done.
Response times are improving, not where I want them, but they're moving in the right direction. Crime is down on top of being down last year. Again, not where I want it, nowhere near satisfied, but that's why dealing with the manpower shortage is so critically important. Because every problem within the department leads back to that issue of manpower and the limitations that are placed on me.
You went from living in Philadelphia, to a much smaller city. How are you adapting to living here in Wichita?
Oh, I'm adapting just fine. I definitely really, really love living here. I love the people here. It's just a very positive vibe, and people are so friendly. So that I'm really enjoying.
Could you talk about some of the wins and losses of the previous year?
Manpower continues to be a problem. The council acted today, approved the renegotiation of the contract and a bonus for the officers’ work in 2023. So that's a huge help with morale. And it will be a huge help, I'm confident, with recruitment… we'll see more people coming to the department.
Because right now, law enforcement is in a unique place. In my four decades of law enforcement, I've never seen a situation like this; where if a young person is considering a career in law enforcement… they get to pick where they go.
The point that I'm making is that I'm competing with all the departments around Wichita for the best candidates. When they look at a department like Wichita, they're attracted because … it's the largest department in Kansas, and it's a diverse department, and you'll have the opportunity to do a lot of different assignments. But at the same time, if our pay is not competitive against the department where you could go and work a lot less hard and a lot less complicated, it's a difficult choice for people to make.
So now, in 2024, we’re going to be the highest, or one of the highest, paid departments in Kansas. When you combine that with the attractiveness of a large department, I think that we are going to see a year from now when we have this conversation, that we will have really come very close to getting back up to the authorized strength. And once I do that, then my goal is to grow the department.
Were there things that surprised you in your first year of leading Wichita police officers?
The surprises were in a good way. The community is very supportive here. And, of course, we have our detractors, but that's a small group of people. But people are very reasonable here. They're very forgiving; they just expect you to own your mistakes and have a plan to fix them, which is the way that I am as a person when I deal with my employees. So it was really nice to see the level of support here. People understand it's a difficult job. They understand that even when they're frustrated with response times during peak hours, they always follow up with, ‘I know you're doing your best.’
I think that probably the gang violence was a surprise to me. That is a persistent problem here. But I think that we've done a really good job of identifying the problem people, the problem places and behaviors, and come up with strategies to identify shooters. And if we can't identify them, we find other ways to disable them, and pull levers on them and discourage them from continuing … We're very data driven, intelligence driven. We don't do random sweeps and things like that. We're very focused on the small group of people that are doing an inordinate amount of crime, and I think that's why we've been successful. And I think that's a big part of the reason why people in general support us.
What's your second year looking like, and what are you hoping to accomplish with that?
Number one, now that we've renegotiated the 2024 contract, it will be just that we're going to really focus on recruitment, I should say continue to focus on it. We have 23 recruits in the academy right now, and they will graduate in the third week of January, at which time we hope to replace them with, I’m praying for 40.
We have had three people who were members of the department who left that have come back. I think that's a really positive sign that they see good things happening in the Wichita Police Department. Also today in (City) council, we got approval for our large Axon (body camera) contract. So there's going to be a lot of exciting technology coming to the department. That technology will help us in continuing to drive crime down. But it's also tied into reform and de-escalation. Giving officers the training and the tools they need to resolve situations.
More teams will be going on the street in the new year. So we can utilize those resources, not only to help people in crisis, but to help people that are part of our unhoused population, people that are dealing with dependence and substance abuse.
You have a new mayor coming to city hall in the next year. How might that affect the department?
I think it'll really be seamless. The one thing where I was fortunate, I always had the full support of the mayor, the city manager and all the members of council. I've been very fortunate in that regard. I don't see that changing.
Wichita police continue to say they're facing a staffing shortage and the City Council just awarded bonuses and changes to the police union contract in hopes of retaining officers. Could you explain how that can make a difference for staffing?
When I suggested reopening the contract, it was after speaking to multiple other chiefs of other departments of similar sizes, in a similar predicament with the recruitment problem … We looked at signing bonuses and things of that nature. A lot of those things really didn't work. Once we began the process of working with the FOP (police union) and getting their input, we realized that the real answer to the problem was not a one-time signing bonus, but it was to make sure that the officers in the department now know that they're appreciated. We were bleeding officers; officers were nowhere near retirement, but they were leaving, and they were going to other places, smaller departments, going to the airport, going to Highway Patrol. One of the reasons that, from looking at exit interviews, it was finances and simply not feeling appreciated and supported.
So I had three goals in mind: I want to attract new people to our department and in the best of the best. I want to make those officers that are kind of in the middle of their career know that they are appreciated, that we do know how tough it is on them out there … working short handed. And for me, the most important thing is that we convince veteran officers that are eligible to retire that it's probably to their financial advantage that they hang in there for a couple more years.
I said at council today, we're going to be hiring a lot of young officers in the next year. I need those veteran officers to be on the street with them, training them, keeping an eye on them, helping us prepare them to work solo. It takes a year to train a police officer, at a minimum a year. That’s six months in the academy, and then six months of field training. And even then, they're probably not 100% ready for some of the things that they're going to face in a city the size of Wichita.
This now solves that problem. Now we will begin very early in 2024 to negotiate the new contract and deal with some of the other issues. We'll continue to address the recommendations in Jensen Hughes, but this is something we needed to do quickly. We needed to do now. I needed to go into the new year with this done. So we can take our time and negotiate the new contract, but it was important that we limit this contract to just a few items.
Wichita is continuing to deal with a rise in fentanyl, in overdose deaths. Are there things that the police department can do to help with this crisis?
We're trying on multiple levels. We've started a new partnership with the DEl; we have a combined group of agents and officers working together and that group also includes deputies from the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Office. We're on the highways doing interdiction. We're also doing education in the classrooms. This is a national problem.
We're going to begin to prosecute those people that are peddling this poison and causing people to die. … When you arrest that person … they begin to become very cooperative and provide information you need to begin to move up the chain. Kansas City, Kansas, has been very successful in that regard. We're looking at what they're doing and looking to take that concept and mold it specifically for our needs here in Wichita.
Homelessness is another issue that our city continues to face. Are there also things there that the department can do to help the unhoused population?
One of the reasons that I look forward to addressing the manpower shortage is I would love to add officers to our HOT (homeless outreach) team. The feedback I get on the HOT team is nothing but positive. They have relationships with people who are part of the unhoused community, they're able to gain their trust. When we need people to move or we have to mediate disturbances, they're able to do that because of the relationships that they have forged.
The real answer, of course, is to get to the root causes of homelessness, and make sure that we have a place to take people. I'm really encouraged by the plans the city has to build a facility that will include a lot of beds so that we have the ability to offer people options. You can't ask people to move simply because they're homeless, when you don't have a place to take them. It's really important for the economic growth of our city that we address the problem, but we do it in a humane and constitutional way.
