Police department launches in growing community of Queen Creek
Jan 12, 2022, 4:45 AM | Updated: Jan 16, 2022, 10:08 pm
PHOENIX — The Queen Creek Police Department officially launched right after midnight on Tuesday with cruisers hitting the streets of the fast-growing town in the East Valley.
The department comes nearly two years after the town’s council unanimously voted to form its own police force to keep up with the community’s growth.
“The key to our success to this date has been all about the community,” Chief Randy Brice said at a press conference Tuesday.
“We recruited, we trained, we have developed our policies and procedures all centered around the fact that we want to have a department and a group of officers and professional staff that were focused on one thing, and that was the community.”
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The Queen Creek Police Department starts out with 73 staff members, 64 of those are sworn officers. A few more positions are still in the hiring process. They’ll serve about 70,000 residents.
Brice said officers and staff have been “readily engaged” with the community throughout the last 6 to 8 months “to find out what they want, how they want the department to run and really developing [the department] from that perspective.”
Over the past three decades, Queen Creek had contracted with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to be the town’s law enforcement provider. MCSO will still have a presence in county islands that sit in Queen Creek.
Brice said one of the goals of the department is to arrive on scene in less than 5 minutes.
“We’re also trying to get as much diversity,” he said. “One of our big focus points was to try to make sure the organization matched the community when it came to some of the demographics.”
More than 30% of staff are women and 10% are Latinos.
Brice also noted that when appropriate and lawful, his department will communicate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement regarding a person’s immigration status and an immigration hold.
“Our focus will remain on serving every member of the community and enforcing all applicable laws,” he said. “We want the community and victims of crimes to feel safe when calling the police department.”
