Police Service Technicians
Police Service Technicians provide support to other units within the department including patrol, investigations, traffic and evidence. PST’s are provided training in order to recognize potential evidence and perform basic criminal investigations. PST’s are tasked with inspecting vehicles for citation corrections and write police reports dealing with non-emergency calls, such as auto burglaries, building burglaries, vandalism, stolen vehicles, lost and found property. These cases involve circumstances where there is little or no suspect information or active leads to pursue.
All of the Police Services Technicians have received training as crime scene technicians. Their training ranges from 60 to 100 hours and covers varying topics including fingerprinting, casting of impression evidence, crime scene photography, firearm trajectories, and homicide scene investigation. Several PST’s have been trained in the use of the Sokkia and Nikon total stations to diagram crime and accident scenes. One PST has also attended advanced crime scene investigation and crime scene reconstruction courses.
The PST’s use this training daily, whether it be collecting latent fingerprints from an auto burglary or photographing a suspicious death. One PST is a member of the IMPACT team, who photograph and diagram major injury, fatal vehicle accidents, and officer involved shootings for other agencies and the crime lab. Additionally, the PST’s use their knowledge to instruct the Citizen’s Academy, conduct line-up training, special events at local schools and to speak to civic groups.
PST’s are a valuable asset to the police department because they are in the field and able to respond to calls for service that generally do not require the services of a sworn police officer. This way, the sworn officers are afforded more time to direct their attention to proactive police activity and are free to respond to more urgent calls.