UP-CLOSE Facility Design – New or Renovation
separate city hall; the presence (or not) of neighborhood services or other divisions that the commu- nity has requested and nurtured over time; population density within specifi c neighborhoods; the community’s primary developed environment (urban, suburban, rural, exurban); and the nature of the community’s demographics (high or low per capita income, for example).
Looking Forward Certain aspects of a police build- ing are somewhat automatic in terms of space allocation and function, but a key in all of these investigations is planning for future growth. While the nature and needs of a tactical unit, for example, are similar across jurisdictions, a growing com- munity that can foresee a gradual shift from suburban to urban environments will need to plan carefully to be able to accommodate a more robust unit. Sim- ilarly, city jail planning must take into account how quickly regional agencies have historically met their obligations to take detainees.
At this stage of a needs assessment, divisions are met with singly, with in- formation then brought back to a senior group to process, integrate with other divisions’ needs, and make recommen- dations. Things as simple as conference rooms require many conversations, and matrixes that spell out what sizes of conference rooms, shared by which divisions, help ensure departments don’t end up with unused or duplicated space, but instead can look forward to effi cient space that meets many differ- ent functional needs. Since existing operations will refl ect the space the department currently oc- cupies, planners and the various divi- sions will spend hours investigating both how the department, for example, handles evidence and how best prac- tices suggest it should handle evidence in the future. Care must be taken, by ev- eryone, to avoid a default to ‘the way it has always been done’ if it can be done better, even where a new system will add to the up-front cost. For example, in most new facilities,
52 LAW and ORDER I March 2016
Grand Prairie, Texas Public Safety Facility
accommodations are made for the in- clusion of storage lockers in the evi- dence department equipped with an electronic tracking system. These sys- tems are more costly, but as officers, evidence technicians, and lab techni- cians drop off and process articles stored one to a locker, the resulting electronic trail of who has accessed each locker helps the department maintain control of sensitive items. Anticipating future needs has, of course, always defi ned planning, but the accelerated pace of technological change affects many more areas of facilities than ever before. Everyone knows about the challenges and costs of bringing fi ber to a site, and most are probably aware of the issues involved in adding band- width to allow for videoconferencing and a fl ood of data storage—but even still, many designers who have tackled police buildings failed to anticipate and plan for the rise in importance of com- puter forensics.
An even more recent develop- ment in forensics is the need for RF shielding in areas in which data is re- moved from electronic equipment in evidence, as well as storage for same. Many planners will recall a time when in-house reference manuals existed that laid down procedures for the de- sign of these specialized spaces, but the pace of change now is such that these manuals are out of date by the time they reach the printer.
Study Hard For a planning fi rm with experience in the building type, it is not unusual for the needs assessment to be able to pinpoint an initial construction budget based on the city’s stated goals for the building project. But each city responds differently to the data they receive, and the resulting back and forth, with building compo- nents added or removed, made larger or smaller, and all the different permutations of how different city agencies and public safety divisions interact, is one of the fasci- nating aspects of performing studies. It is only after you have studied the community’s growth and have agreed on a logical plan that encompasses square footages that make sense, that you can begin to design a facility that truly meets a department’s needs. What you quickly see is there are many possi- ble solutions, and the ultimate design is always interesting to watch take shape. It might be totally different from what anyone imagined at the beginning of the process, but planned with sensitiv- ity and foresight, the “right” building for the community emerges every time.
Hal Sargent is a principal with Brinkley Sargent Wiginton Architects. He may be reached at
hsargent@bsw-architects.com. Photos by Charles Davis Smith are courtesy of Brinkley Sargent Wiginton Architects.
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