The Idaho State Police recently unveiled their new state of the art administrative building in Pocatello. The building includes the patrol, investigating, and administrating arms of the District 5 ISP. The new structure was begun last year, after several years of study and planning by District 5 architects, and police cut the ribbon to officially open it and welcome in the public this week. The 23 thousand square foot facility offers public tours on a daily basis.
According to Captain Eric Dayley, the current district commander of investigations and patrolling for District 5, prior to the opening of the new building he would have to coordinate visits with his staff in several different buildings, and often went weeks at a time without personal contact with some of his staff due to logistics. But now, he says, he and his co-workers feel like a cohesive team, since they can meet together as often as they want in the same building.
In the past the District 5 administrators had rented several buildings in the Pocatello area to house the different operational units, and although they were hooked up with each other by phone and internet, there was still a lack of organization and some built-in inefficiency. Soon after the new ISP complex was completed at District 3 in Meridian in 2008, and authorities saw how much more efficient that was for police work, it was decided to create a similar single unit complex for the District 5 ISP.
The new building for District 5 contains one of the most up to date evidence labs in the entire state of Idaho. It also features a state of the art drug toxicology and drug chemistry analyzing facility. It is one of only three such facilities in the entire state of Idaho, and as such is also responsible for calibrating every single blood alcohol measuring device used by the ISP in southeast Idaho.
Forensic Director Matthew Gamette, who works closely with the ISP, says that fully one-third of all of Idaho’s breathalyzers are cycled through the new facility to be recalibrated on a regular basis, as well as a third of all toxicology and chemical analyzing requests.
Gamette also says the brand new lab is designed using the Lean Six Sigma procedure — a business concept first formulated at Harvard Business School to help organizations improve output by whittling down the amount of paperwork and procedures required for standard operating practices.
He says that now when a piece of evidence comes into the building it immediately goes to the vault, which was designed based on concepts from SpaceSaverIntermountain, and from there ISP technicians have instant access to it for a quick turnaround. He also wanted to point out that the new building has large interoffice windows throughout so that natural sunlight cuts down on the lighting bill, and so that civilians visiting on business or on a tour will get a feeling of complete transparency in the operations of the ISP.
Innovative video testimony rooms have been added so that technicians can stay onsite when working with the Idaho courts giving technical testimony in cases. This eliminates the need to actually travel, thus cutting down on travel expenses and time away from their regular duties.
Col. Ked Wills calls the new ISP center “a great addition to the peace and safety of the good citizens of Pocatello and the surrounding area.”
