Note: The meeting agenda listed the date as June 17, 2024, but the user-provided date for this summary is September 26, 2024. The summary reflects the later date as instructed.
The Public Safety Committee met to receive the Police Chief’s quarterly update and to discuss the potential adoption of an Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) program. Public comments focused on privacy, scope, and accountability. The committee expressed support for starting a UAS program with careful oversight.
I'll just take a motion. Second. Thank you. On to general business. And this is the Chiefs quarterly update. Yes. It's truly the Chief update. Yes. And now for the Chiefs. Can you start playing with the pressure at all stage? Okay. First off, thank you for uh for having us here. Uh for a quarterly meeting. We'll jump right into it for the sake of time. Uh over the last quarter, we promoted two people, Corporal Ed Berry, Mike Checky to the rank of corporal. Uh both uh actually Ed Barry was promoted last year officially, but this was a swearing in. And we appointed dispatcher Christy Wing, she's currently in training, completed the uh dispatch academy and is working our way through the dispatch uh program. Also during that night, we recognize three individuals for their stellar performance over the last uh year. Uh professional staff and put in the year, she's she is a public uh police record specialist, Natalie. Uh our officer of the year, Michael Checky, who was also uh promoting the rank of corporal the same night. So he brought home a lot of hardware, and then our volunteer of the year, Cindy Birch. She's a volunteer. If you read her resume on what she does, plus her uh plus our day job as an engineer, we'd be here forever. The amount of time that she puts in as a as a volunteer is pretty fascinating. And that was you know, each year, this is probably the hardest one to pick because of some of the work they do on our own time and uh true value to the community, uh to take away from the you know the work that's done, but it's just uh what she does on our own time. It's just truly extraordinary. Uh overview our training continue to you know, we had 690 hours of training in the last quarter. That's on top of normal uh hours of uh the regular patrol and other functions within the police department. Those are just a few of the ones that uh that are listed. Um that's pretty standard uh operating training for us throughout the course of the year. Slide. So one of the biggest updates instead of uh doing major incidents that occur, or we're just gonna kind of focus on this one for a little bit. The O'Donnell Park homicide that occurred on May 24th, eight and nine. Uh we some of the things that I you know, like I kind of said a few times we can discuss and uh happy to discuss somewhat things further, but really it's an ongoing investigation that is uh that continues to get more complicated as the days go along go longer. Victim was specifically targeted that evening. Uh there are multiple individuals involved. We have written almost probably close to 50 search warrants regarding this uh the storm side in the last three to four weeks, and we've winged on all of our resources outside just the city of Belmont from the Crime Lab to the GA's office to multiple federal agencies and regional task forces. It is you know, um you know, one of those shattering things that happens to a community uh each each time it happens, especially in Belmont, right? We're we think we're a siloed community, but reality is we're just one of 101 cities in the barrier of encompassing 7.7 million people, and unfortunately, sometimes things fill over our community. So we have to continue to be prepared for that and understand that you know how we how we respond, how our keep our community connected moving forward next slide, please. This is what we did this last quarter regarding our engagement and outreach. We had the flight safety day, we had our uh Easter egg hunt, uh autism awareness month, our youth advisory committee town hall, we have uh recognized mental health awareness month, and we had our community meeting regarding that uh the homicide and the home use story balance. Uh great great uh great discussion um about the incident, unfortunately. We came together under a uh an unfortunate incident to to do that. Now, where do we have going forward? Uh our disaster preparedness day on August 3rd. It's a special day for me. National night out, August 6th. Our fourth community academy starts August 28th. I'll put a shameless plug in for all the millions of people that are listening uh to go ahead and sign up for our uh community academy.