Cape Girardeau Police Department gets bulletproof facelift

The lobby and records offices at the Cape Girardeau Police Department are getting a facelift -- a bulletproof one.

Using money generated by the city's public safety tax, the currently cramped records office will become 17 feet longer, said Capt. Jack Wimp of the Cape Girardeau Police Department.

Assistant chief Roger Fields likened the space currently used by one of the five records clerks at the department to a closet.

In addition to the extra space the records division will have, bulletproof glass and Kevlar-reinforced Sheetrock will surround the new offices, similar to the window currently at the front of the lobby where the station commander sits.

Southeast Missouri State University donated the materials, and the remodeling work was contracted with Boulder Construction of Cape Girardeau, Wimp said. The cost of the project was estimated at around $5,000.

"One of our big concerns was security," Fields said.

The idea to beef up security in the lobby came about after the department relocated five division offices -- the drug, sexual assault, traffic, Safe Communities and public affairs units -- into an $80,000 mobile home next to the police department.

Some of the officers had concerns about those units being easily accessed by anyone who entered headquarters through the lobby. A chain-link fence protects the area from the street but not from anyone who would walk through the front doors of the department and hang a right, where they could exit the main building and enter the mobile home offices.

"People had free rein of the modular," Wimp said.

To avert problems, security doors were recently installed to block access to both the mobile home and the back parking lot, where officers park both personal vehicles and patrol cruisers, and additional cameras were placed overlooking that area.

Wimp can remember a time when someone trespassed in the back parking lot by entering the lobby and broke into an officer's personal vehicle.

On another occasion, he said, he was working the night shift and was standing toward the back of the building when he and other officers heard the sound of glass shattering.

A man had wandered into the station after having too much to drink and taken a baseball bat to the window of the records office, Wimp said.

Since the communications office has relocated to the new emergency management center on North Sprigg Street, the old space used by communications will be converted to a witness interview room.

Some of the need for expansion and shifting comes from growth of the department. The current police building was filled to capacity when it was built in the 1970s, Fields said.

"Now we won't have to kick the sergeant out of their office to interview witnesses," Fields said.

There are rooms on the second floor of the station designed for interviewing suspects, but those are tiny spaces that can be intimidating and uncomfortable for victims or their family members being interviewed.

Another recent addition to the department is a new break room, housed in the space that used to be the public affairs office.

Now the room is painted in sky blue, navy and gray, with police department initials stenciled around the perimeter of the concrete walls, and personnel have a sofa and a place to watch television while eating lunch.

The majority of work on the break room was done by prisoners on work release and cost about $1,600 to complete, Wimp said.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

388-3635

Pertinent address:

40 S. Sprigg St., Cape Girardeau MO