SCOPE office planned in southeast Spokane

A growing population in south Spokane has brought a need for a new community-oriented policing effort in that area.

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, in conjunction with SCOPE (Sheriff’s Community Oriented Policing Effort), is seeking volunteers and an office location in southeast Spokane to serve unincorporated areas just south of the city.

At a meeting last week, more than two dozen people turned out to talk about community policing, and several people at the meeting offered to volunteer.

With those volunteers, the South Spokane SCOPE will have a core group of about 20, which should be enough to get the effort going, said Simone Ramel-McKay, program coordinator for SCOPE.

“We had a great meeting last week,” she said.

Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich told the volunteers at the meeting that he wants SCOPE to be part of the move to intelligence-led policing.

Communication between volunteers and neighborhoods can be an important building block for gathering intelligence, Ramel-McKay said.

SCOPE volunteers can become an active part of protecting public safety through a series of programs that have been built into the system.

A specially trained SCOPE Incident Response Team is called out to major incidents to provide traffic control and other services. The volunteers also turn out for large community events.

Volunteers are trained to take fingerprints and photographs of children or vulnerable adults so that parents or caregivers can have a record for law enforcement in the case of abduction or getting lost.

Also, volunteers are responding to vehicle prowling to lift fingerprints for officers. That information can be used to spot crime sprees in progress, Ramel-McKay said.

“Often, it’s more than one crime that’s committed,” she said.

She said that finding a location for a SCOPE station is proving to be a challenge. The Moran Prairie Grange would not be suitable, and the nearby fire station on Palouse Highway cannot accommodate a SCOPE office because the station space is used for training.

Ramel-McKay said that a vacant apartment in one of the larger complexes would be a possibility.

Having an office gives volunteers a place to meet and provides deputies with a location for report writing. The interaction an office provides adds to the mission of SCOPE, Ramel-McKay said.

SCOPE works with Neighborhood Watch on crime prevention, especially when one locale is getting hit by a crime spree and neighbors want to put an end to it, she said.

Countywide, SCOPE has nearly 600 volunteers with about half of them being very active in crime prevention and public safety work. The other volunteers have varying levels of commitment to the work, Ramel-McKay said.