About two dozen members of the community attended the event, where Fort Dodge Police Chief Dennis Quinn and Webster County Sheriff Luke Fleener answered questions posed by members of the audience.

One of the first questions asked was “How would you suggest handling interacting with the homeless that are walking through a neighborhood and hanging around during the day and potentially on your property?”

Quinn started by noting that the homeless population in the city has been a “hot-button topic” for a while now.

“What I try to remind everybody is that regardless, the homeless are humans too,” he said. “They deserve compassion, they deserve the same things everybody else deserves. I sometimes think that people look at it like, well, we just need to make them disappear. That’s not fair — we don’t know the story to what that person has been through or where they come from.”

Quinn said that when the FDPD is called to a situation involving something like a homeless individual loitering or something like that, he encourages his officers to not just “shoo” them away every time.

“Sometimes we’ve got to try to see if we can help them,” he said.

One of the ways officers can help is to refer the individual to Brittany Baker, a justice involved service coordinator for Central Iowa Community Services (CICS) who works with the police and sheriff’s departments at the Law Enforcement Center.

Quinn said officers also have to “look outside the box” when handling these situations. While the city of Fort Dodge has an ordinance to crack down on loitering downtown, because of capacity issues at the Webster County Jail, officers are unable to arrest violators. With Baker as a resource, she’s able to help connect those individuals to services that can help get them off the streets and back on their feet.

Quinn and Fleener were also asked about gang violence in the area.

Quinn said that there are some gangs active in Fort Dodge, but it’s hard to put a number to it because some are just small “clusters” of people and aren’t affiliated with any larger, well-known gangs like the Bloods or the Gangster Disciples. Those smaller gangs without a larger affiliation can be hard to track, he said.

“While we have some gang presence, we’re not like Omaha, we don’t have that huge amount of people,” Quinn said.

The chief added that there are some “offshoots” of those larger gangs from Omaha that are maybe influencing some of those smaller gangs, but “we definitely don’t have the problem that some people think that Fort Dodge does.”

Fleener answered a few questions about the proposed $45.5 million new jail project. County voters will take to the polls on Nov. 7 to decide whether the county should take out a 20-year general obligation bond to build a new jail.

One person asked if there were any state or federal funding available to offset the property tax impact of the proposal. Fleener answered that it’s a county issue, not a state issue and there aren’t any grants to fund the project.

If the bond referendum passes, Fleener said the new jail would be expected to be operational in two and a half to three years.

At the end of the meeting, Randy Kuhlman, CEO of the Fort Dodge Community Foundation and United Way, endorsed the jail project.

“We need a new jail, folks,” Kuhlman said. “And I know it costs money. I ran the math … if we don’t build this new jail now, in 10 years from now, the price will be 50 percent higher than it is today, and in 20 years, it’s doubled.”

Quinn and Fleener both said about 75 percent of the criminals their officers deal with on a daily basis are repeat offenders who aren’t being held in jail because their offenses may not be violent, so there’s no space for them in the jail.

“If we want our community to be safer, we have to have a new jail so we can house these people and get them off the street,” Kuhlman said. “None of us want to pay more taxes, I understand that, but we need a new jail and that’s one thing that can really impact the safety of our communities.”