The City Council held a work session at 5:30 PM to receive an update on the Operation Bold Blue Line and Operation Ceasefire grant, followed by a regular meeting at 6:30 PM. The regular meeting included a public hearing on the Historical Village at the Dismal Swamp environmental review, approval of consent and regular agenda items, and appointments to boards and commissions.
We want to welcome everyone to our work session on July 25th. We have one topic, I believe, Mr. Manager. Yes. Sir, thank you, Mr. Mayor. As you recall, I think it was uh uh late uh maybe mid-last year. Um Governor Yunkin and Attorney General Miares introduced uh um some initiatives to help reduce crime throughout the Commonwealth. They they picked uh some some select uh cities uh around the state. Chesapeake's one of the partner cities. Um we had a very good opportunity to engage with the governor's staff and the attorney general staff last year to talk about issues uh with with crime in the City of Chesapeake, ways that we could utilize additional resources should those resources come available. Um it's been a pretty successful partnership. Um so at uh at council's request, I've asked uh police chief and his staff to come and brief counsel on uh Operation Bold Blue Line and Operation Ceasefire, uh particularly in terms of the grant funding that we've received to date and how we're utilizing those funds. And I'll turn it over to Chief Sileski. Thank you, sir. Yeah, as Mr. Price said we were asked to come share some information tonight uh about Operation Bold Blue Line and Operation Ceasefire. It was October of last year that uh Governor Glenn Youncan and Attorney General Jason Mayoris uh unveiled Operation Bold Blue Line and Operation Ceasefire. The purpose of these two programs is to support actions being taken across the Commonwealth to reduce violent crime. This grant funding was to provide resources for Virginia localities to address violent crime in part by providing much needed equipment and technology. So with that, the senior staff of the police department were asked to examine their areas of responsibility to determine what equipment would be beneficial for our crime reduction efforts. After consulting with their personnel, we submitted a grant application for the equipment that you'll see in the following slides. Yeah, back up one more. So this slide uh outlines the $692,476 we received in the grant and what we purchased with that grant. The first item listed is Panasonic laptops for our patrol officers. Contemporary policing requires the use of computers. Officers on a daily basis complete accident reports, offense reports, access police websites. These detectives often investigate crimes that have a link to violent crime. So having access to computers in the field that give them access to internet capability enables them to access various websites and share intelligence information with other department personnel. We do operations from time to time where there's chatter, you know, on the internet that our detectives can pose as someone else, get in on that chatter and gather some intelligence on activity that's going on around the city. We also purchase laptops for our Internet Crimes Against Children unit and our special victims unit. Evidence in these cases that are investigated by our Internet Crimes Against Children unit include offenders sharing pornographic material involving children. So oftentimes the ICAC unit may need to recover digital evidence in the field to further those investigations. So it's helpful to have laptops in the field instead of having to go back to the precinct to access information. The next item was level three ballistic shields. We currently outfit our officers with ballistic or bulletproof vests and bulletproof helmets. However these shields are intended to provide officers additional protection against bullets including rifle rounds. So why these are important is these would be used in situations where officers have little or no cover when confronting armed suspects. So if they're in a a mall or an office building where there may be long hallways once they turn the corner they're committed when they go to confront an armed suspect. So although the bulletproof vest and bulletproof helmets help uh you know best practices are to try to shield the bullets before they impact the vest or the helmet. So these very lightweight shields will be deployed in the field and officers will be able to use them when they are in situations that they have little or no cover. The next item are poll what we call poll cameras and I needed to preface this with these images that you have are just for illustrative purposes only and may not actually reflect identically the items that we purchased but residents in many neighborhoods typically don't have extra security measures such as doorbell cameras or other surveillance equipment that they're able to share with us. So when our gang unit detectives are in certain neighborhoods where there is no other access to the cameras or other devices these will help us have the capability to deploy live surveillance cameras in hotspot areas to better address violent crime and see what's going on real time in these neighborhoods. The next item is a mini split climate control system in for all practical purposes an air conditioner but a super air conditioner. This system gives our Internet crimes against children unit investigators the ability to cool electronic devices seized from suspects because if these devices were to overheat before they can be mined for the data that's on the devices it can destroy the the data that's on the devices so it's very important that they stay cool until they're done with their forensic examinations which leads to the next item is a forensic workstation for our Internet Crimes Against Children unit. They often need to process massive amounts of digital evidence when they're dealing with such cases and sufficient computing power is essential to keeping up with this need. The next item is a forensic imaging system. Many crimes have gone unsolved due to a perceived lack of evidence or evidence that's nearly impossible to collect without the appropriate equipment. So this system will significantly enhance our ability to identify and capture clear high resolution images of evidence on items that was previously not possible. The next item are dry safe cabinets forensic drying cabinets are used to dry and store wet material containing biological or blood evidence.