The Newport Police Department is hiring a community affairs specialist to work within the community and build relationships with residents.
Barry Shields, who currently works in the code department, will fill the new role, which will be oriented toward community policing. Newport Police Chief Chris Fangman said the role will involve doing a lot of outreach and working a case log, like a detective, on who or what needs police attention.
“There are parts of a uniformed police officer’s position that are just inherently sometimes not as approachable, and it can be intimidating for some people that we serve,” Fangman said. “I want to cut through that, and I want to have somebody that’s very close to the residents on any given Street. Barry has a great plan to evaluate every street, get to know anybody who’s elderly or underserved in the community.”
Fangman said the community affairs specialist will work in parallel with the police social worker position, which the department is in the process of hiring.
Newport Manager John Hayden said that through Sheild’s role in the code department, he did a lot of work in the community. For example, he helped identify residents who could benefit from façade grants through ReNewport.
Another facet of Shield’s role will be working on alcohol beverage control issues, such as assisting the Alcohol Beverage Control Administration with enforcement and investigation.
Fangman said the police department has been monitoring a couple of neighborhood bars due to their activity over the past few months.
“Part of what Barry will be doing is we want to find the roots of those issues in any given neighborhood and be able to work with ABC and be able to have somebody with various knowledge of code and citing for things that are out of hand, more aggressive looks at things that need to be taken care of again, prior to when police have to show up for a fight in the middle of the street,” he said.
Hayden said the city is implementing this role at close to zero cost. That is because the city is moving people around and not backfilling certain roles.
Hayden said that in the past, they had a problem with a bar on 3rd Street that Shields helped to solve.
“There was just significant issues that we continue to having, and when Barry and Paul Kunkel (Captain at Newport Police Department) started putting together a plan of attack for them, we noticed that the issues dropped significantly,” Hayden said. “Certainly, the gravity of the seriousness of the things that were going on had changed.”
Shields and Kunkel came up with what they informally call the “Third Street Collaborative.” That group consists of representatives of Newport on the Levee businesses, Thompson House, GAME TIME and other players on Third Street.
Hayden said bringing everyone together got the businesses to work together on common goals, and the city started seeing folks partner to put more lights or cameras in their establishments at no cost to the city.
“I think it did a good job of setting expectations and got rid of the finger-pointing of ‘What about them?’” Newport Mayor Tom Guidugli Jr. said. “Everyone worked together, and it all worked well.”
