County to speed up background checks for Sheriff’s office candidates

Yesterday, October 10, Thurston County’s Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) waived bidding requirements for professional services, specifically background check contracts of the Sheriff’s office, to process more applications.

Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders explained the situation to the board, saying the current background investigators are five retired police officers with limited working hours per year.

“The strategy for this is that we hire extra help to have certain qualifications. These are all retired police officers. The biggest constraint that we have with that, though, is that they can only work 690 hours a year, otherwise, they cannot collect their retirement,” said Sanders.

Sanders shared that when he took over, the office had one part-time background investigator, and he hired four more.

“Throughout the year, we have a background problem we need a bunch of work to get these backgrounds done, and we have to space these individuals out evenly through the year otherwise, they immediately burn up their hours, and we have no background investigators,” Sanders said.

Since then, Sanders shared they have created three additional background investigator positions that we are assigned only to the jail, and the cost is about $26,000 a year per part-time background investigator.

“We've come to find out we're not even close. We need a lot more part-time background investigators to reach the FTE package that we truly need. So with that, we set out and embarked on trying to find a third-party contract vendor who could do background investigations only for us,” shared Sanders.

The third-party vendor, Public Safety Testing, met all the different requirements that the Sheriff’s office needed.

“PublicSafetyTesting.com is a third-party tool we use to test our applicants. We already use their services; we have a contract with them for testing. We are essentially looking to go into a contract with them now for additional background help,” Sanders explained.

Sanders also mentioned that although the team can only do four background checks a month, they had a 45-day turnaround, which is considerably better than the two-month industry standard.

 The contract with Public Safety Testing is estimated at $2,500 per applicant based on service hours. For instance, getting 10 hours into a background won't cost the whole $2,500.

 Sanders shared that the office uses this service because they currently have at least 33 vacancies, most at the jail.

 Considering that the retired officers working as background investigators may leave the job at any time, the Sheriff’s office has considered other methods to fill the investigator positions, such as opening up overtime to detectives and sergeants.

 Sanders shared that they have a lot of applicants at present. They have a complete list from April but cannot process it yet because they are still working on the lists from February and March.

 “The only way to do this is to increase the quantity that we have to do at one time,” said Sanders. “It's a two-month process from the time that you get the applicant. If we have 40 people on our list and we have two/three background investigators, you can imagine how much time it would take for those individuals to get through. Right now they're handling about three to four backgrounds at one time.”

The Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) waived bidding requirements for the Sheriff’s office's background check contracts to process more …