# Arkansas Department of Public Safety The Arkansas state-government umbrella department that houses the **Arkansas State Police** and several related public-safety divisions. Headquartered at #1 State Police Plaza Drive, Little Rock AR 72209. The corpus's first state-level executive-department entity. Identified as the parent of [[Arkansas State Police]] by [[Ryan Roach]]'s email signature on the FOIA correspondence — Roach signs as *"Attorney, Department of Public Safety"* rather than as ASP-specific counsel, and the DPS Fiscal Section is the responsive office for ASP's procurement records. ## People - [[Ryan Roach]] — Attorney, Department of Public Safety; primary FOIA correspondent for the 2026-05-19 ASP ALPR FOIA request. - [[Jesi Feld]] — DPS staff; CC'd on all ASP FOIA correspondence. Role not specified in the corpus. - [[Wanda Worley]] — Procurement official, DPS / ASP Fiscal Section (`[email protected]`, 501-618-8728). Contact on the 2024 Term Contract and the larger PO. - [[Anna Hawthorne-Pennington]] — Procurement Manager, DPS / ASP Fiscal Section (`[email protected]`, 501-618-8335). Contact on the 2025 smaller PO. ## Roles in this corpus - **The administrative parent of [[Arkansas State Police]].** DPS is the umbrella department; ASP is one of its operating divisions. The corpus's clearest documentary anchor for the DPS-ASP relationship is the use of "Arkansas Department of Public Safety – Fiscal Section" as ASP's procurement-records custodian and the Roach attorney-of-record role. - **The custodian of ASP procurement records.** ASP's procurement file for the Leonardo ELSAG system is held under the DPS Fiscal Section's records system (AASIS / SAP-based). The records-of-record path runs DPS Fiscal Section → AASIS → eventual FOIA response by Roach. - **The FOIA-response counterparty.** Roach's email signature *"Attorney, Department of Public Safety"* and the institutional FOI address `[email protected]` identify DPS as the legal-counsel layer responding to ASP-specific FOIA requests. *Observation:* the FOI address uses the `asp.arkansas.gov` subdomain even though Roach signs for the broader DPS — suggesting the FOI intake is operationally housed at ASP and routed to DPS Attorney for response. - **The conduit for federal ARPA pass-through to ASP.** ASP's Leonardo procurement is funded under the `A.0960.ARPERR` budget code, which traces to the federal ARPA appropriation per [[HB 1202 Section 35 ARPA Appropriation Excerpt]]. The DFA Disbursing Officer is the state-level intermediate distributing ARPA money; DPS receives the allocation and assigns it to ASP via internal cost-center coding. ## Internal divisions documented in this corpus - **[[Arkansas State Police]]** — the law-enforcement operating arm; primary subject of this corpus's batch 1. - **[[ASP Fiscal Section]]** — the procurement-and-finance unit that responded to Item 1 of the FOIA request. Its responsiveness to Item 1 contrasts with the Lieutenant-routed Items 2 + 3 (operational records) and Grants-Division-routed Item 5 (federal-grant records). Other DPS divisions not yet documented in this corpus but referenced by structural implication in Roach's emails: the Grants Division (responsive to Item 5), and presumably divisions including the Highway Police Division, Crime Lab, and others. ## Notes - The DPS umbrella structure is recent in form: the Department of Public Safety as such was reorganized to combine ASP and other public-safety functions through a series of Arkansas reorganizations under former Gov. Asa Hutchinson's transformation initiative. Tier-2 web research on DPS's organic act and division roster would clarify the full subdivision inventory; this is a backlog item. - The DPS / ASP organizational distinction is structurally relevant to FOIA practice. Roach as DPS attorney handles ASP FOIA requests, which means ASP records are produced through DPS counsel — a different organizational chain than at LRPD or Conway PD (where the agency's own internal records-custodian handles FOIA). - See [[Arkansas Crime Information Center]] for the parallel state-level criminal-justice-records entity Joshua named in Roach's Item-4 disclaimer.