Eye on Safety: Oklahoma County detention center's new interim director

Oklahoma County Detention Center has appointed Interim Jail Administrator Paul Timmons. Timmons joined the News 9 team Wednesday morning to discuss his new role at the detention center and discuss ongoing issues at the jail, including health violations and DOJ scrutiny.

Q: What professional experience are you bringing to your new position?

Well, I've been in law enforcement for a long time. Although I've never worked in a jail facility, I think that the experience that I have in the various areas of law enforcement helps me to deal with the situations at the jail.

Q: Safety concerns have been a top priority. How do you go about addressing these?

So I feel like I have extremely well-versed staff, and they they they helped me a lot one of the top concerns is of course the mitigation of the introduction of contraband into the facility. We've taken steps to really mitigate that contraband entering the facility. I think we had a 85% drop in contraband this last month, so we want to keep building on that and just getting our staff up to speed as far as training. That's an area that we've really focused on for the last two years. I think we went from a two-week academy up to an eight-week academy. Now we have an academy that's supposed to graduate in early May, so that'll help with our staffing levels, but we're always looking for employees.

Q: What changes are being made to reduce the introduction of contraband into the facility?

So, we're working with our partners, our other law enforcement partners on the state level, as well as the federal level. We've started doing facility searches using canines. We've also started doing employee searches at the employee entrances. Our biggest challenge has been through the mail. There's a lot of attempts to get contraband in through the mail, so we've tightened that up. And we're looking at trying to purchase some equipment to help even more with that. And if we're able to make those purchases or that purchase, we'll be able to use it throughout the facility as far as doing inspections and helping us locate contraband.

Q: How do you plan on recruiting more staff?

We are our own best recruiters, so word of mouth is probably the best way for us to go about trying to get people to join our staff. We advertise, things like that. And I think one of the biggest challenges that we have is when people come to work there, a lot of them are inexperienced in the corrections field, so they don't know what to expect when they take these positions. And so, like I said, our academy has changed a lot in the last year and a half, so we try to send them through the best training that we can provide for them. We do a lot of scenario-based training and hopefully prepare them as well as we can for what they're going to face.

Q: How do you plan on keeping issues from carrying over from the old jail to the new facility?

It's going to be a challenge, I think, but we'll face it however we need to. I can't give you any specifics. We'll face those challenges as we come to them.