JCC Police Under One Roof in New Station

By Sam Thrift Thursday, August 04, 2011

The James City County Police Department cut the ceremonial ribbon last week and welcomed citizens into their $13 million station that will supply the police force with a facility that could pass as the newest Law and Order set.

Major Steve Rubino of the James City County Police Department explained how the upgrade from the old 9,000-square-foot building to their new environmentally friendly 47,000-square-foot complex will give the department the ability to perform tasks that were impossible before.

Along with a gym and training facility for the officers, the building is equipped with a forensic lab for examining and testing evidence. Among its new tools is a Cyanoacrylate Fuming Chamber, used to capture fingerprints off items. The lab will soon have a machine to see if the fingerprint matches anything in the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS.

The building also has a forensic garage with portable lifts for examining vehicles that may have been involved in a crime, such as a hit and run. Previously police had to use off-site facilities like fire stations to conduct evidence testing. The garage also has a line of chambers where evidence that is wet, such as a bloody shirt, can be dried before being placed into evidence.

Walking through the area where the evidence is stored, there's a room with a nameplate that says, ‘Fred,' shorthand for Forensic Recovery Evidence Device. The room is a work station that is used to collect digital evidence without the possibility of altering the data.

For those who enter the new building in handcuffs, there are soundproof interview rooms waiting after you get out of the police car. Two cameras and a microphone connected through the wall will record every move made in the bare rooms, and can be watched through any of the officers' computers in the connecting office.  Anyone interrogated in the room will also have their interviews instantly burned to a DVD for evidence.

Another room that stands out is labeled ICAC, or Internet Crime Against Children, which is a task force that helps officers enhance their investigative response to Internet offenders. “In this room, officers can go online and pretend to be kids to catch online predators,” Rubino said. “This is something we did before, but we never had an area to do it.”

Even the layout of the building was designed with safety in mind. Rubino explained that the facility’s design was created based on other police stations and incidents, like a 2006 Fairfax County shooting during which the suspect hid between cars in the parking, then shot and killed two police officers.

An elevator accessible to a parking lot at the rear of the building allows police and suspects to go straight from the car to the interrogation rooms without being seen by anyone who isn’t part of the department.

The lobby has two rooms available with recording equipment for anyone who decides to come to the station to report a crime, something Rubino said the old station did not have.

Although the new building is substantially larger than the last, its size is a little deceiving. The older station could not fit all of the task forces that were associated with the department, which meant divisions had to work in four different offsite locations.

“We had to have people offsite because we didn’t have room in the old building to fit them,” Rubino said. “The new building allows all of the police force to come under one roof.”

Some offices remain empty in the new building to prepare for future population growth, with available space based on needs anticipated over the next 25 years.