Sunday, September 16, 2007

Goodbye to the old Police Station
(and good riddance!)

My dad and I went down to the auction preview at the old police station and snooped around. I wish I had taken more than the 20 or so pictures I took, but I was doing more looking than photographing. I know my way around it pretty well, but with so much stuff moved out it was a challenge even for me to navigate the maze. Here are a few images:This is pretty much the standard hallway in the converted car dealership that our officers called home for decades. If you want to pass someone in the hall, you have to turn sideways and shuffle past each other.This was something I was kind of surprised didn't make the news. From the looks of it, the entire south wall of the station sank several inches sometime during construction of the new station, which is mere feet away. I wouldn't want to have been working in the old station when that happened. All the offices on that side of the building now have a slope to their floor. Fortunately the whole building will be gone within weeks.


On the left was the Tactical Operations Bureau, which consists of undercover detectives and gang officers, and on the right is the Detective Bureau. Imagine trying to deal with a witness or suspect on the phone with another officer doing the same only 2 feet away. The TOB offices were formerly a closet.


For you CSI fans out there, these are the 2 tiny rooms that the DPD's civilian evidence techs had to work out of. I don't watch the shows, but I doubt theirs look like this. The DPD techs don't drive H2's either. For those of you that took the tour of the new PD, these were replaced by that spacious basement room with the counter around the outside and 3 or 4 long workspace islands. They also now have several cubicles, whereas in the old station they shared one desk seen in the lower right of the 2nd image above.

Here are all 20 of the pictures I took, hosted on Flickr with small descriptions. You really can't get the full impact of these unless you took the tour of the new Police Station.

If anyone can look at those images and say a new Police Station wasn't needed, I certainly can't understand how.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I heard the stuffed bear collection was used to fill out suspect lineups.

Anonymous said...

Noone said that they did not need a new station. What we "againsters" said was "Do they really need the monstrosity that they ended up with?"

Just more money not being spent for patrol officers is how I look at the new station. It honestly could have been half the size it is and accomplished the same goal.

QuadCityImages said...

The problems with that argument are:

1.Half the size wouldn't be big enough
2.Going with "good enough" is how they ended up with the former station.
3.Isn't it better to spend the money now, rather than spend more money expanding the PD later if Davenport keeps gaining population?

I don't want anything the city builds to only be good enough for now; I want them planning and building things for the future as well. Why build something that will be at capacity from day one?