Pray and serve: Chaplains volunteer with Iowa City police

IOWA CITY - The Rev. Anthony Smith has most of the vestments one would expect to find in a pastor's office: Bible, robes, Christian literature.

Tucked inside his closet, however, is something not found in many offices like his: Smith's Iowa City Police-issued bullet-proof vest.

Smith doesn't wear the vest when he's delivering a sermon at New Creations International Church in Iowa City. He doesn't wear it when he's with his congregation delivering meals to the homeless or otherwise serving the community. It doesn't go home with him at the end of the day.

The vest is part of his 'uniform” for the one week each month Smith serves as on-call chaplain for the Iowa City Police Department. He doesn't wear it every day he's on call, but it's a good thing to have when he's in the patrol car with an officer or called to a tenuous situation.

'I don't have any fear, really,” Smith says, 'but I do have the vest and I do wear it when I'm in the car.”

Smith is one of four chaplains currently working with the Iowa City Police Department in a program started by Chief Sam Hargadine in August 2013. The program started with five chaplains, then grew to six - but then fell to four when two chaplains left the state. Senior Patrol Officer Steve Fortmann, who serves as liaison to the chaplains, said the department would like to fill those two vacancies.

'We're trying to reach all of the people in our community,” Fortmann says, adding that the chaplains are an asset to officers when victims need immediate spiritual or emotional counseling, or even just someone to sit with while waiting for family members.

But although helping officers tend to victims and families is an important part of the chaplain's job, it's secondary to their main role: to provide counseling to the officers, other members of the police department and members of the officers' families.

'This is a very unique situation,” Fortmann says. 'We (officers) often see things people aren't meant to see, and it really takes a toll on a person's psyche. Sometimes having someone to talk to can be a real benefit.”

Having the chaplains available doesn't make it easy to ask for help, though, Fortmann said.

'Police officers are the last people to admit they need help,” he says. 'That's why the ride-alongs with the chaplains in the car are so important, they build that trust and those relationships so the officers get to know the chaplains they're working with.”

There are benefits for the chaplains, too, Smith said.

'We get to know the officers, we know where they're coming from, we get to know their personality,” he says. 'We really start to develop a relationship with them.”

'They do get to know the officers, get to see what the officers go through first-hand,” Fortmann said. 'They see the day-to-day stress the officers go through, so they know it probably better than the officers' own pastors do because those pastors don't see it.”

Right now chaplains are each on call one week a month, but that will change to once every six weeks once the department is fully staffed. Chaplains serve on a volunteer basis, but commit to being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week when it's their week.

That doesn't mean they actually serve all those hours; in 2014 the department's six chaplains were on call for 8,784 hours, but only actually worked 610.5 of those. Though the hours worked aren't broken down into the type of call they responded to, chaplains are all trained to respond to a full gamut of calls: domestic violence, homelessness, natural disaster, victim counseling, and more.

'We have the ability to stay with the victim or the victim's family while the officers go on and take the next call,” Smith says. 'That doesn't tie them up when there are other people who need them.”

Fortmann called the availability of the chaplains 'another tool in the belt that helps these officers.”

'The fact is that they are a tool they can use to provide a continuing service from what we were initially called to do,” Fortmann says.