KCSO: Stay in your jurisdiction

COEUR d’ALENE — City police have been denied a green light by the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office to venture outside their jurisdiction for follow-up police investigations.

Sheriff Ben Wolfinger in a letter to the police department said his deputies will continue in their role as the police agency outside city limits, and that any exceptions that allow city police to work in the county are already covered under existing statutes.

Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White last month through a Memorandum of Understanding asked Wolfinger for permission to allow city officers and detectives to work in the county as they investigate cases, but as of this week, the MOU remains unsigned.

“I will not be signing the document,” Wolfinger wrote in a letter to the city. “I believe the document as written gives unfettered authority to the Coeur d’Alene Police Department to work anywhere … without corresponding accountability.”

When city police officers need to follow up on crimes, Wolfinger said, they must request permission from the Sheriff’s Office, as per the current policy.

“Rarely, if ever, is it an emergency situation that cannot wait for the assistance from the agency of jurisdiction,” Wolfinger wrote.

Taxes from city residents pay a portion of the costs of county policing, as well as a portion of the costs of the city police department, and a county cross-deputization policy already allows city officers to pursue criminals that committed felonies and leave the city.

Broadening the agreement falls outside the county’s responsibility to its residents, he said.

“I do not believe that the citizens of … Kootenai County are willing to allow such authority without the corresponding accountability,” Wolfinger wrote.

White, who sent the MOUs to sheriffs in Boundary, Bonner and Shoshone counties in addition to Wolfinger, said one sheriff, David Kramer of Boundary County, signed the agreement.

White said that in a two-month period this year his investigators had 36 incidents in which they needed to leave the jurisdiction. Code restrictions, he said, can create a burden on outside jurisdictions when city police investigate cases in their jurisdictions and the MOU could help lighten the burden on other departments. The city, he said, has a current agreement with Kootenai County that was signed in 2013, but the latest MOU was meant to upgrade the old agreement.

He said his department will continue to work with the sheriff on addressing the need to have his investigators work outside city limits.