Consultants working to develop first strategic plan for police

The Center for Public Safety Management, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm hired by the city of Sedona to draft a strategic plan for the Sedona Police Department held a public listening session with about 30 attendees on April 16.

In the next months, the city will develop its first-ever strategic plan for SPD. The $37,500 assessment covers staffing, patrol coverage, training, policy and succession planning.

Chief Stephanie Foley initiated the review after significant internal change, including nine newly approved officer positions and several reorganizations, seeking outside validation before pursuing further additions or budget requests.

City Manager Anette Spickard and Foley gave a brief introduction, introduced consultants Jarrod Burguan and Robert Handy, and left the room during the public comment portion of the meeting. However, City Councilman Pete Furman did attend for the duration, though he did not make any public comment.

“This plan is being developed with input from all kinds of stakeholders, employees, agencies that work with our police department and the final draft will be presented to the city council for their ultimate approval,” Spickard said. “Then we’ll use it as our guide and roadmap moving forward on things we want to invest in the police department.”

Burguan said the process included a well-employee survey, meeting with other city department heads.

“We did another community forum about three or four weeks ago,” he said, and they conducted two on-site visits with roughly 70% of SPD staff to identify SPD’s current strengths and weaknesses. CPSM had the listening session ahead of additional meetings with SPD, and it will help develop the plan in a final workshop with SPD staff.

Two major weaknesses stated by CPSM are officer turnover and employee attrition in the police department, and poor communications with the public.

“This has come up repeatedly. … We have heard that communication, whether it’s internal within the agency, or some of that external communication with the community can be improved, or, in some cases, is not very good at all,” Burguan said.

“I confirmed with CPSM that their comment was based on the feedback they have received so far from a variety of stakeholders who expressed that SPD could be more proactive in putting information out to the public and doing more to present the positive image of SPD instead of allowing the bad actors to dominate the narrative on social media,” Spickard wrote.

“We do think the turnover, and the attrition of the department is an issue that we need to try to find strategies to help fix,” Handy said, based on the current SPD roster and mixed tenure of employees.

“Our goal tonight is to talk a little bit about SPD, talk about your feelings for the organization,” Burguan said. “I want to keep it narrowly focused on what is helpful in the sense of a strategic plan.”

He said he wants to focus the conversation as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and analysis.

Some of the strengths from residents include: The mission statement, but some feel SPD doesn’t live up to that. Public comment during the session included a mix of SPD operational feedback, personal interactions directed toward staff, misinformation circulated on social media and off-topic remarks that frequently disrupted the meeting — though roughly about 60% of the comments during the meeting were positive towards the department.

Much of the first half of the meeting was spent on residents discussing an April 8 trespassing incident at an Uptown business that was later shared on social media.

The social media post also spilled over to SPD dispatch, with the department from April 1 through April 19 being inundated with 3,449 emergency and non-emergency calls. That breaks down with 589 calls from April 1 through 7, 2,432 calls between April 8 and 14 — after the incident was posted online — and 408 calls from April 15 to 19. For comparison, SPD received 1,589 calls from April 1, 2025, through April 19, 2025, according to Deputy City Manager Lauren Browne.

“The city wanted to have this meeting, knowing full well that there was a very good chance that this discussion was going to go in directions that wasn’t necessarily going to be helpful for a strategic plan, but the city still wanted to have this meeting,” Burguan said. “I think they deserve a little bit of credit.”

Spickard said she anticipates that the report will be out before early June and will go before Sedona City Council later that month.