Walter putting his own stamp on police force

Monday, July 28, 2008

After 21 years in law enforcement, Mountain Home police chief John Walter said he still loves to come to work every day.

And after six months on the job as the city's police chief, Walter said he is having fun, that he works with great men and women and sees Mountain Home as a great community.

He also sees it as a huge challenge to keep Mountain Home as a great community, but a challenge that he wants.

"I want to do a job where I can feel like I can make a difference," Walter said. "If I didn't want a challenge, I would have stayed in my old position.

Walter retired from the Prairie Village Police Department in Prairie Village, Kan., after working there for 20 years. He was sworn in as the chief of police for Mountain Home eight days later.

During the interview process, he met with former mayor Joe McNeal -- who declined to comment for this story -- and current mayor Tom Rist, whom Walter said were honest about the challenges and perspectives that came with the job.

"It made my job easier to come in with my eyes wide open," Walter said.

He knew changes were going to have to be made when he took the job.

He also knew where ideas for those changes were going to come from -- the men and women who work for him.

"It's not my job to come in with a vision," he said. "They know the community and what works and what doesn't. They had the answers. They just needed someone to ask them."

Walter met with every employee within two months of taking the job to see what they thought worked and what didn't. He has 18 typed pages of notes from those meetings.

"My job was to listen to my employees and discover what their vision was because they know," he said.

His next job was to take their concerns, mix it with what he believes to be professionalism and community police work and to prioritize the list.

One of the first things Walter did after the series of meetings was to reorganized his force.

He found 90 percent of his staff worked under one division. As a result, many on his staff had too many things to do to focus on doing them all well.

"I don't want people doing 10-15 things mediocre. I want them to do 3-4 things outstanding," Walter said.

"We're going to do outstanding. If we can't do outstanding, we're not going to do it," he said, making reference to Jim Collins' book "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Other's Don't," a book on corporate leadership he keeps in his office.

Walter made drastic changes to the department's organizational flowchart, moving people around and redistributing the work load.

"Some people are going to work harder than before, others are going to work just as hard but only on three to four tasks," he said.

He took people who had been in key leadership positions for several years and gave them new jobs.

He wants the department's leadership, and the rest of the staff, to understand the department's entire operation, not just one small part of it.

To do that, he put leaders in new positions but left experienced staff members under their supervision where they can work and learn together.

His idea was to blend fresh energy and fresh ideas with experience. He said the result has been exactly what he wanted -- the staff challenging the status quo and looking for ways to improve operations.

"By asking people to do things they haven't before, they challenge the status quo and that's how you make improvements," he said. "That's how organizations go from good to great."

Walter asking his staff for their opinion wasn't a one-time thing. He is putting together a task force to investigate internal issues or problems.

Walter feels members on the task force will become more educated with an issue and more education contributes to a well-rounded officer.

He expects one of two things to happen when issues are bought to the task force. The officers may discover the policy in place really is the best solution or they will find a new solution.

Either way, he believes involving officers in the solution process will increase department buy-in because they will understand why certain things are the way they are or they had offered an outstanding solution to the problem.

Before accepting the police chief job, Walter had the chance to review the department's policy manual. He wasted little time marking the manual up where he felt improvements were needed and would give the department's current policies a "D" grade.

He said it is going to take an additional 12-18 months to produce a good working document to provide his staff with guidance.

"Officers want to follow the rules, they just need to know what those rules are, and that's pretty important," he said.

He and his staff plan to review every policy from top to bottom, incorporate industry standards into the policy and set up a multi-level review process that will incorporate members of the department at all levels.

Walter credits his leadership style to his experiences of working in top to bottom organizations as well as team-oriented ones and feels he understands what works.

He said he is chasing his dream of taking his ideas of teamwork and progressive police work and seeing if they really work. He said he is doing a lot of the same things now that he did at his previous job but instead of applying them to a group of eight to ten people, the fun is seeing how to make them work for an entire organization.

"People want to be involved, if we let them, good things will happen," he said.

Walter has made a number of other changes, too. He directed an annual training plan be completed, took steps to ensure a supervisor will be on every patrol shift and in the fall, a school resource officer will be assigned to Mountain Home Junior High for the first time, including having an office in the building.

While he is pleased with the progress the department has made, he said he isn't pleased with his own progress.

Walter said he is thrilled how his new employees have been open to his leadership and how the team has come together.

He said he is being pushed by his staff more than him pushing them, something that excites him.

"I never anticipated I would get to work with that talented of a group," he said.

Rist, who was sworn in as mayor the same night Walter was sworn in as chief of police, said Walter's managerial skills have been excellent. "I feel from our standpoint, we're very fortunate and lucky to get someone of his caliber."

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  • Mr. Walker nice job. Been here 10 years and can see things changing. Thank you.

    -- Posted by Momof 2graduates on Tue, Jul 29, 2008, at 9:07 PM
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