SAN MARCOS -- At the beginning of this month, Chase Stapp was sworn in as San Marcos chief of police.
Stapp started his law enforcement career with SMPD in 1992, moving up through the ranks until he was promoted from assistant chief in early August. The San Marcos native took over the role after previous chief, Howard Williams, retired after 11 years.
On Monday, KVUE's Hays County Reporter Eleanor Beck sat down with the SMPD veteran to talk about his goals for the department, and the challenges he sees ahead.
Here are excerpts from their conversation:
Tell me about taking this position. Has this been a longtime aspiration?
Not as long as you might think. I've worked here basically all of my law enforcement career, but never really aspired to be the chief, or even though that would be possible until about two years ago or so. I often thought it was a job I didn't want to have. But the closer you get to any given job, and the more you understand it, you know, that tends to change your perspective. And I think it did in my case.
It must be a very different department [SMPD] today than when you started, tell me about the differences between the day you walked in here and the day you took over as chief.
You can't even draw a comparison almost. When I started here we had I believe 56 police officers, we have 99 now. The technology was very much outdated. We do very well know with technology. We didn't have as much capacity to offer the services we do now to the public. It truly wasn't the same department.
How does growth impact the department? What make that challenging?
The difficult part with growth is you're always behind the curve, so to speak, when you're a public service agency. The growth happens, you have to deal with the growth, and the challenges that it brings you immediately. But the funding that's available from that growth doesn't come until later. That's one of my goals, is to work with my staff and really look at a five year vision for the department, and try to look at a way to deal with that growth as proactively as we can.
What are the biggest challenges, the things you worry about, as chief of this department?
Our biggest challenge right now is staffing. For a period of time, San Marcos just didn't have the means to add police officers like it really needed to. And within the past two of three years City Council has started to do that, and it has started to grow, our numbers. But it takes so much time to get a police officer hired and trained and then out on the street, where they're actually doing the job, we really haven't been able to get to the staffing that we need since they started adding this positions.
What are the things the department is doing really well? And what are the things you're thinking to yourself, "Huh, we're going to spend a little more effort working on that?"
We provide a very high level of public service to the citizens of San Marcos and our visitors. That's one of the things that we pride ourselves on and that's one of the things that we value and our officers get it. Just as an example, I got two letters last week from citizens commending officers for taking that extra step to really help them in their time of need.
One of the things that we need to do better, and we're on the verge of being able to do this is to work more intelligently at policing in San Marcos. Currently, we do not have a crime analyst. And in a city of this size, that's kind of unheard of. I think the council this year, although the budget is not finalized, the feedback has been positive that we might get that position this year. That's going to be huge for us. It's going to allow us to focus our efforts in ways that make more sense, in the problem areas, to address patterns of crime that before we really just had to take shots in the dark at.
What do you see being the things that are going to challenge the city from a public safety standpoint?
Again, a lot of it has to do with growth. There are factions in San Marcos that are in favor of growth, and then there are factions that aren't and they tend to collide, and very vocally here in San Marcos. It's just a matter of how we work through that in a peaceful way.
The resources aren't there [to handle mental health issues in town] and the demand is growing. Where do we stand on that issue today?
We still have one mental health officer, an officer that's dedicated to that type of services. We need more. We have applied for a grant, it is a federal grant. The initial application last year indicated that we were not approved for that grant. But then we received word from the government later that they had reopened the grant process and that we were being reconsidered. So far, it's looking like we may actually be funded this year for one or two additional mental health officers.
It depends on who I talk to, whether people say we have up-and-coming gang issues in town. What do you think about that?
Yes, there are gang issues in San Marcos. They are not nearly as bad as they are in other places, but to say that we don't have gang activity in San Marcos would be incorrect. We do have officers that monitor that as part of their regular duties. Our investigations unit every couple of months or so will spend an entire day, sometimes more than one day, just tracking down known gang members that have warrants for their arrest to try and make them understand that San Marcos is not a place they can feel comfortable doing business.
