Queen Creek police grows with community needs

In just more than three years, the town of Queen Creek has gone from no police department to one that is expanding at such a rapid clip it has already outgrown existing office spaces.

When the Queen Creek Police Department officially took over law enforcement from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in January 2022, the force had 64 officers and nine professional staff.

Today, QCPD has 119 officers and 39 professional staff with an anticipated 25% increase in personnel for the next few years, QCPD Chief Randy Brice said.

To accommodate the growth, Queen Creek plans to build a new standalone police headquarters and a parking structure roughly bordered by Ellsworth Loop Road, Ellsworth Road, the Municipal Services Building and the Community Chambers.

In December, the Queen Creek Town Council approved a more than $4.7 million design contract for both structures. Brice said the they would open sometime in 2028. According to the Queen Creek Police master plan, the headquarters and the parking structure are estimated to cost more than $59.6 million.

In 2023, the town purchased the Barney Family Sports Complex for more than $11.1 million and is currently converting it into a public safety complex to support QCPD and the Queen Creek Fire & Medical Department. That total cost is cited at more than $69.5 million, according to the QCPD plan.

“That should be done by the end of this calendar year,” Brice said. “That basically is going to serve all the immediate needs that we have.”

The building will provide officer and firefighter training space, a K9 facility, evidence storage and a repair bay for Queen Creek fire vehicles.

The joint police and fire support facility and police headquarters with the parking garage will be paid out of the $75 million in bonds that were sold in December, plus another $75 million bond issuance set for 2026. The total $150 million in bonds also will be used to pay for new roads and other needed infrastructure

The debt will be paid through impact and capacity fees, the operating budget, the 2% sales tax dedicated to transportation, and water and wastewater rates.

“The town is really unique in that regard from just about every other town,” said Scott McCarty, deputy town manager and chief financial officer. “Most other communities if they were building that facility, they would have a secondary property tax that their voters would be asked to approve. We pay for that mortgage, if you will, out of our operating budget. Town council has a policy to not have a voter-approved secondary property tax in the town of Queen Creek.”

Among other public safety facilities, the town also has long-range plans to build a $33 million substation and vehicle repair area estimated for completion in fiscal year 2032-33.

There are also plans for a “justice center” that would include a municipal court, a prosecutor’s office and a temporary detention facility. The current estimated cost for the complex is $47.3 million.

“There is no anticipated kickoff for that. It’s just whatever makes sense, and the budget allows,” Brice said.

As for hiring more police personnel, McCarty and Brice emphasized public safety remains a priority with the council, and it will respond based on community needs.

“You don’t want to overstaff when there’s no need for it,” Brice said. “We want to make sure that we’re a good steward of the taxpayers’ money and the council’s outlook is always to make sure that public safety meets the needs of the community.”

When it comes to determining how many officers a town or city needs, there is no one formula.
The number of officers municipalities hire can be based on a combination of such factors as population size, the number of reported crimes, the number of service calls or even on a percentage of a city’s budget, Garth den Heyer, a professor and instructor at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University, stated in an email.

“Although there has been research into the allocation of the number of police officers in an agency, there is no scientific method for saying what is the correct number to match the size of the population or the geographical size of an area or the miles of roads in a jurisdiction,” he stated.

For example, of the Valley’s cities and towns, Avondale is the closest in population size to Queen Creek with almost 95,000 people in 2024 compared to the almost 82,000 residents in Queen Creek.

Yet, the Avondale Police Department, which stated on its Facebook page “has been proudly serving since 1947,” has 159 sworn officers compared to the 119 the young QCPD currently employs.

While the towns may be similar in size, Avondale, founded in 1946, has grown at a much slower pace than Queen Creek, which was founded in 1989. In 2000, Queen Creek’s population stood at 4,316 while Avondale clocked in at 33,883. By 2020, Avondale had grown by 55,451 residents. Queen Creek had grown by 55,203.

“It’s not necessarily apples to apples because one of our problems here locally is that we’re surrounded by a lot of populations,” Brice said. “That’s kind of that X factor where you can’t just look at our population. San Tan Valley alone has I think close to 120,000 people that all come to this community either to shop, go to church, go to school or pass through for other types of events or work.”

Den Heyer also stated another factor for Queen Creek is that it is “contiguous to the larger Phoenix metro and may experience a flow-on crime effect.”

It’s not unusual for QCPD to be part of cases that cross various cities and towns.

“Crime doesn’t respect borders,” Brice said. “We just had a case that started at Mesa and went through four different jurisdictions, and we all were involved in it.”

Among the factors that play a part in growing the QCPD force besides population are traffic, crimes levels and service calls, Brice said.

In creating the department, the town council put a priority on community policing, which MCSO did not have the bandwidth to provide.

“We’ve increased our engagement with the community and really started to build that trust and the transparency,” Brice said. “We’ve seen calls for service increase exponentially because more people are calling us about stuff. They tell us all the time that ‘We would never have called before.’

“You see this natural progression of calls for service increasing while our crime rate continues to stay low and sometimes lower in certain crime categories.”

Please send your comments about this article to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines. Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org.