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As homicides rise, a Kan. department feels the strain

By Tim Potter
The Wichita Eagle

WICHITA, Kan. This year’s spike in homicides has taxed Wichita homicide detectives, but the Police Department is managing it by using investigators from other units to assist with the time-consuming investigations, an official says.

The high number of homicides also has caused overtime to rise significantly, police Deputy Chief Tom Stolz said in an interview with The Eagle.

The homicide unit has seven detectives and a supervisor the same staffing as last year, when 26 homicides occurred. Twenty-six homicides has been a typical number for the past several years.

So far this year, there have been 37 homicides, a pace that would possibly reach the record: 57 homicides in 1993. That year, the department had six or seven homicide detectives, Stolz said.

But even with this year’s crush of homicides, the department isn’t cutting corners in investigations, Stolz said.

“We thoroughly cover homicides, more than any other crime.”

Investigating homicides takes a special expertise and a high level of experience. There is an “art to interviewing people who have killed other people. They get very good at it,” he said.

But there are seasoned detectives in the sex crimes and gang units who bolster homicide investigations when needed, Stolz said. That happened Aug. 25 when police had to investigate two homicides and a suspicious death within a few hours.

Often, gang unit detectives take key roles in investigating gang-related homicides. In 21 homicides this year, either the suspect or the victim was a gang member, police said.

This year’s homicides have occurred in bunches, often on weekends.

August was a busy month. The homicide unit logged 261 hours of overtime that month, the highest for the unit this year. In February, a much slower month, homicide unit overtime reached only 20 hours, records by Stolz show.

The base salary for most Wichita homicide detectives, who have relatively long tenure, is about $57,000 a year. General overtime pay is time and a half. So a rough approximation for the unit’s August overtime would be about $10,000, Stolz said.

The department recognizes that “there’s a diminishing point of return when you make someone work 12 to 14 hours in a row,” so it monitors how much detectives work, Stolz said.

Often, he said, “you have to tell people to go home. These people are going to want to stay on” their cases.

A department committee is looking at staffing, and one idea is to put more people on night shifts to better manage the workload, Stolz said.

If the number of homicides stays high for another year or so, then it would make sense to take long-term steps to increase the number of homicide detectives, Stolz said.

Brian Withrow, an associate professor of criminal justice at Wichita State University, agreed.

Still, the current spate of homicides stretches staffing, Withrow said. “This is sort of an all-hands-on-deck sort of thing.”

Overtime pay is just a temporary fix, “because at some point, people would say, ‘I would rather have the time off,’ ” said Withrow, a former Texas state trooper.

Because of the variety of the skills needed, “it takes years to develop a homicide detective,” Withrow said.

Wichita police Sgt. Chester Pinkston, who is president of the Fraternal Order of Police, the bargaining unit for officers and detectives, said “it’d be nice if we had more detectives.” Still, he said, the current homicide unit staffing is “nothing that causes me concern.”

Despite the increase in homicides, investigators have been able to clear about 90 percent of the cases, meaning arrests were made or arrest warrants were issued.

Some of the most time-consuming work for a detective occurs after an arrest, because the investigator still has to do follow-up interviews and assist prosecutors when cases go to trial.

In a typical homicide case, Stolz said, the lead detective will work roughly 200 hours, from when the investigation begins until a jury reaches a verdict.

Copyright 2007 The Wichita Eagle