New Police Quarters Planned If Approved, It Would End Crowding, Be Close To Shop, And On North End

They are jammed pistol by nightstick into narrow cement-block corridors, quarters so crowded that holding cells harbor bicycles and boxes instead of bad guys.

The men’s locker room is a dingy reminder of what might be found in an old junior high locker room. The briefing room is the size of an upscale walk-in closet.

But by fall 1999, the Coeur d’Alene Police Department could have a new $2.8 million building. It will be the first time in more than 90 years that the Lake City cops have had their own digs.

It also will be the first time in nearly a decade that the entire police department was together under the same roof.

The Coeur d’Alene City Council is expected to give final approval March 17, clearing the way for construction to begin by September. Liquor tax money, annexation fees, and dollars from the city budget will cover the cost on a 10-year lease-purchase plan.

Police see savings written all over this project.

The new cop shop will go on three acres of land the city already owns on Schreiber Way, not far from the new Postal Service processing center. It puts police within a block of the city shop.

This means a clerk who spends half of her time shuttling patrol cars the five miles from the shop to City Hall will be able to help with purchasing, issuing uniforms and other tasks.

The station is being built on the north end of town, because that’s where the growth is occurring, Lt. Ron Hotchkiss explained. Police should be able to get to it more easily, because of its proximity to Ramsey Road. And it puts the police much closer to the jail.

There is the additional space, welcome considering current make-do arrangements that include the DARE officer, the community relations officer, a sergeant and a clerk all sharing one office. The records division will have room for the reports and tickets that now cascade from boxes, stacked boxes, on top of filing cabinets in a pool-cue skinny room.

The 17-person investigations staff was pushed out to the Harbor Center eight years ago as the city building department and the city attorney’s office squeezed into the basement of City Hall. The new building will reunite patrol and investigations, making it much easier to share information. It will have enough lockers and a place for officers to take a car involved in a crime and comb it for evidence instead of going to the tow yard, Hotchkiss said.

Equally important, the new building will be secure, ending the days when suspected criminals and a wide array of citizens have easy access to the entire police department.

Some of those security features carry a grimmer tone - windows above head-height to thwart drive-by shooters, bulletproof glass at the front counter. The entire building would be elevated, so no one could pull a truck bomb up to the front door, Hotchkiss explained.

Talk about evolution. The first Coeur d’Alene Police Station was a two-jail-cell affair at the corner of Second Street and Wallace Avenue that cost the city $150 in 1888. Twenty years later, the police department joined the fire department and the rest of local government in the new City Hall at the corner of Fifth Street and Sherman Avenue.

That building went for $35,420, Hotchkiss said. It lasted until 1979, when police and city staff moved to the current building.

And the new place?

It should be big enough to take care of the force until 2018.

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