Public Safety Center entering final stages

Mar 06, 2023

The Ponca Politics Committee toured the new Ponca City Public Safety Center, located adjacent to the old police department building, and will house the Ponca City Police Department and Municipal Jail.

The first most notable difference between the this new facility and the older one is the amount of space. The department has outgrown the old building, one that was beginning to become claustrophobic.

"The new facility will give our officers and employees the opportunity to work with the space and modern tools/ technology that will allow them to best serve the community," said Ponca City Chief of Police Don Bohon. "A new modern facility will also make our agency a more attractive place to work, and help with recruiting in a very competitive job market."

The new facility offers many state-of-the-art tools to assist law enforcement in their day-to-day duties. The first of these that visitors to the new Public Safety Center would likely see is the new lobby which is both larger than the previous police lobby, but also features video visitation rooms, and new security features such as bullet and blast resistant glass doors.

A new addition for the department is the presence of an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) which is to be used in the event of townwide emergencies such as tornadoes, and ice storms. EOC is within a concrete shelter that is FEMA-rated for an EF-5 tornado and consists of all the necessary tools for department heads to coordinate during emergency situations. This facility also include bunks in the event of long shifts, and an area for dispatch to move to so that they can continue their operations.

Office space has also increased for the department with the facility. The administration suite is located on the upper floor, and is only accessible through an access control elevator. This provides the added benefit that no one can access the upper floor without first receiving approval from someone within administration. The space includes offices, a conference room and records keeping, along with several interview rooms. In total, the new facility features five interview rooms: two downstairs, and three upstairs.

A smaller, but no less important, new addition are windows that are in the facility. The previous police station was largely windowless, owing to its original construction as a fallout shelter.

Detectives now have access to a larger room with cubicles to work from, an Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) office, and the facility also has offices for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control (OBN) meth task force to work from.

One area of the department that has received the biggest upgrade is dispatch. Before, dispatch worked from a very small room, but now their new area will feature their own bathroom, break room and lockers. New technologies also use LED lights to show whether the dispatcher is currently on a 911 call.

One of the largest section of the new facility is evidence storage. This new facility features drying cabinets for wet evidence, and a machine that assists in fingerprinting by using a vacuum to keep the powder from going away from the station.

The evidence bank will be closed off with passthrough lockers that can only be opened from the opposite side once something is put within. The bank itself is accessible only to evidence techs. Storage is done via high-density shelving for general evidence, while separate rooms have been set up for homicide evidence, drugs and money, and firearms. The department can keep evidence for years until they are released from the District Attorney.

Additional evidence gathering tools include the pres- ence of a forensic garage that the department can use to place vehicles that are evidence in a case. This space will allow police to look through an entire vehicle and even lift it off the ground for a full search.

The facility also features locker rooms, showers, a workout area, a kennel for a police dog, and a break room including microwaves, refrigerators, ice/water machines, chairs, vending machines and a quiet room.

The new jail area can all be controlled from a central location within, and features day rooms, padded cells, isolation rooms for when someone may be sick with an infectious disease, and an exercise area for inmates to use. The jail is also connected to a sally port so that an officer can pull their vehicle up and bring a prisoner into the jail with worrying about them fleeing.

The new Public Safety Center is anticipated to be finished this year, with delays owing largely to the pandemic supply chain issues. Costs to date for construction, architecture, engineering, design and equipment comes into a rough, but not final, cost of $20,186,972.74.