City of Sunrise, Flordia
Double Tier Lockers
Double tier lockers conserve space at Sunrise Police Department.
Officer Locker Room
According to a recent installation of the annual America’s Safest Cities report, Florida’s city of Sunrise is the sixth safest of all Florida cities with populations of over 75,000. That’s due in large part to the City of Sunrise Police Department, established in 1961.
A few years ago, Sunrise’s police department was revamping their facility, and as part of the upgrade, the department would have a gym that could be utilized by all employees. This created a need for large locker rooms for the men and women. And, the department was moving from several separate locations to one central location, which meant a substantial storage locker quantity was needed for all types of personnel—and some positions (Captain, Major, and other superiors) needed larger lockers than others.
With such a large number of storage lockers needed, the department quickly realized there wasn’t a lot of room for benches—and to boot, the lockers and benches needed to allow enough room to retain ADA clearances in the space.
The other factor to consider for the space was appearance. City of Sunrise’s Chief of Police wanted his facility to stand out among all of the other agencies in the county, therefore looks—and a healthy dose of innovation—was extremely important.
Working alongside the police department, Dan Smith, a sales representative for authorized Spacesaver distributor Patterson Pope, came up with a custom solution that was an offshoot of Spacesaver’s FreeStyle® Personal Storage Locker, which he called the double tier locker.
The double tier locker featured two tiers of half-height locker doors and a bench on all lockers with a bench that extended across each row of locker drawers. False-front drawers on the locker benches added to the neat appearance of the locker banks, and in addition to the double tier lockers, there were the requisite amount of full height lockers for those who needed it.
Personal Storage Lockers
The benefits of this small yet mighty custom solution was evident immediately. The FreeStyle lockers allowed the department the flexibility to move accessories within the locker to meet individual needs, the combination of the double tier locker and full locker quantities provided the required amount of locker openings the department needed, and the bench on the lockers meant the department didn’t have to worry about finding space for additional bench seating. In addition, the benches on the lockers meant that there didn’t need to be an expansion of the rooms—and the department was still able to maintain all of the required ADA clearances.
In keeping with the Police Chief’s needs for a great looking space, the resourceful storage solution aligned with the other state-of-the-art equipment at the new police facility—helping to make the building one of the most modern police administration buildings in the state of Florida. And, what started out as a focus solely on gym locker rooms was expanded to handle evidence storage, weapons storage, police administration records, and more.
