Wanted: Fishers police officers

By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com

Like most of Hamilton County, Fishers is growing by leaps and bounds. Fishers Police Department (FPD) is actively recruiting new officers to keep the community safe. The Reporter spoke with FPD Recruiting Officer Brad Myers about what the department looks for in a potential hire and how policing has changed in the last three decades he has been on the force.

Myers became interested in community service in high school thanks to a strength and conditioning coach on the football team in Kokomo who was also a police officer with the K-9 unit. Later, at IU Bloomington, he enrolled in the cadet program, which allowed him to attend the police academy his senior year in college. He became a Fishers police officer in 1997.

“Fishers was basically just kind of a ‘no-name city,’ if you will,” Myers said. “I’d been told by other people that Fishers was up-and-coming as far as population growth, opportunities for improvement, and as far as job advancement, career advancement. That is why I chose Fishers.”

Myers was the 30^th police officer hired in Fishers in 1997.

“I saw a population boom,” Myers said. “When I first came on, it was probably right around 40,000 people, and we’re currently looking at 104,000, 105,000. So, of course, I’ve seen that population boom, which in turn means we need to find the right people to be able to serve our agency and be able to serve our community.”

Myers said he and the other members of the recruitment team, Sergeant Ellison and Kelsey Ramsey from PR and marketing, are looking for people who have a passion to be able to serve a community and a well-rounded approach.

“What that means is that we’re not afraid to step out and do the hard things,” Myers said. “To be able to sit with people in some hard times, to be able to learn and to be able to be empathetic with people, but also to not be as – well, let’s just say when somebody breaks a rule or commits a crime, we want to find the people that are willing to do that, but yet to be able to do it in a way that’s empathetic, understanding, but yet not to be able to bend or break. We need some people that are battle-tested. We need people that are tough and that are able to be able to go towards the sounds of help and not shy away from it.”

Community policing is one of the things many police departments, including Fishers, focus on.

According to Myers, a big part of that is mental health training.

“We’re learning more about mental health,” Myers said. “We’re learning more about people who are really struggling with their living situations. We’ve seen an uptick in vagrancy, homelessness, that type of thing. It’s not as prevalent as it is in communities either south of us, or west or east. We are Hamilton County and we are lucky to have what we have. But I think that we see people who are down on their luck and they’re having issues. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to create an atmosphere where officers have empathy and that they know how to treat people that are going through difficult times.”

FPD is looking for both brand-new recruits and lateral transfers of officers who are already serving in other police departments.

“When we select certain officers who work for an outside agency, we bring them to our agency and we begin with what our standard operating procedures look like at Fishers’, as opposed to where they used to work,” Myers said. “If we were to bring a brand new person who’s never had any law enforcement experience whatsoever, we send them off to the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy for their month of training. Then they come back and we put them through a strenuous field training officer program, about 16 weeks. Then they move to their probationary year.”

According to Myers, Fishers PD sees approximately 75 percent of new officers coming in as lateral transfers.

For people interested in becoming a Fishers police officer who have no law enforcement training, Myers said he has seen several people in that situation who were very successful.

“I would say anybody that has the opportunity to communicate with other people [could be a good fit],” Myers told The Reporter. “We’ve seen people who have been servers in restaurants, and we’ve seen them excel simply because they can deal with problems on the spot. I’ve seen some people who’ve had military backgrounds that have done very, very well, obviously, because there’s a trend for understanding discipline in the military. There’s a discipline component with the police department. So we see them, the people from the military, they do great.”

Kelsey Ramsey, from Fishers Police PR and marketing, told The Reporter 28 percent of the department’s sworn officers are either former or active military.

Regardless of where you are working now, if you want to explore the possibility of becoming a Fishers police officer, you can learn more online at police.fishersin.gov/home/why-join-fpd.