Youngstown Police Chief Rod Foley is planning for the worst case scenario, which is video arraignments from the Mahoning County Jail coming to an end on Feb. 6.
"They were adamant that they were not going to allow us to do video arraignments out of their jail," Foley said.
So Foley is getting creative, changing the times and days for arraignments. Instead of five days, he's looking at three afternoon days.
"Bring individuals over in the afternoon, hopefully Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays," he said.
To address space and safety issues in the Youngstown Municipal Court, the plan is to use the police department's old city jail.
"We're going to conduct our own video arraignments, leaving the prisoners on the fifth floor. So that way we don't have to clog up the court system down there," Foley said.
But those changes come with a disadvantage: Re-adjusting manpower on the streets.
"Looks like I'm pretty much going to have to pull some officers off the road during the afternoon time to try to assist our jail staff," Foley said.
The chief said that could mean a change in response time.
"That may hinder out response times of police patrols during that time period when they're being arraigned before I can get them back on the road," he said.
Foley said he is hopeful some kind of compromise will be worked out with the Mahoning County Commissioners and the sheriff. On Thursday morning, Commissioner John McNally met with Sheriff Randall Wellington and the jail warden about the issue.
"I have asked the sheriff if we're going to be working on increasing his revenue through the city prisoners and the city ordinance violation, that we hold off on the video arraignment issue," McNally said.
That means sending someone to the jail to make sure the city is properly billed. In the meantime, Foley is ready to put his plan in place and he said if he has to implement it, he's going to try and do it without using overtime.
Also on Thursday, Mahoning County sheriff candidate and Poland Township Police Chief Brian Goodin suggested a plan of his own for the ongoing video arraingment and jail staffing debate.
He said video arraignments must continue because having city officers transport inmates accused of violent crimes to court endangers those officers, the public and court workers.
Goodin said he would look at moving sheriff personnel around and look at ways to bring more money into the department.
"I just think there's other ways that it can be done," Goodin said.
He said one way to bring in more money is to collect additional fees from criminals, similar to what outlying courts do in drug cases. He said he also would like to see more seizure money supporting the sheriff's department operations.
