Deputy Chief Operating Officer Landry Merkison opened the meeting, explaining that the Clayton Performance Reviews (CPRs) allow department directors to present goals, successes, and challenges for the first quarter of fiscal year 2025 (July–September 2024). Ten departments reported directly to the Board of Commissioners, with the remaining ten reporting the following day. Citizens were invited to submit questions via email.
Clayton County Police Department – Chief Kevin Roberts
Clayton County Library System – Director (unnamed) and Director Parham
Office of Economic Development – Director Erica Rocker
Department of Housing and Community Development (presented under Community Development section, but identified as housing-related)
Office of Resilience and Sustainability & Emergency Management – Interim Director (unnamed)
Community Development Department – Assistant Director Cheryl Brooks
Clayton County Fire and Emergency Services – Interim Director Tim Sweat
Office of Youth Services – Administrator Sierra Dunn
Human Resources Department
So good morning, Clayton County Citizens. My name is Landry Merkison, and I have the pleasure of serving as your Deputy Chief Operating Officer for the Board of Commissioners. We're here today to present our fiscal year 25 quarter one Clayton Performance Reviews. Our Clayton Performance Reviews are a way for our department directors to come together and present to you our Clayton County citizens their goals, their successes, and their challenges for fiscal fiscal year 25 quarter one. As we go through our presentations today, if you have questions that you would like to submit to a department head, please submit your questions to CPRQestions at Clayton County GA.gov, and we will make sure that we get you an answer just as soon as we can pull your information together. This morning you're going to hear from 10 of our departments, and then tomorrow you will hear from the other 10 departments that report directly to the chief operating officer. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome up number one this morning, Chief Kevin Roberts from the Clayton County Police Department. Chief Greetings on behalf of the Clayton County Police Department. I'm Chief Kevin Robertson is my pleasure to represent the agency as we continue to serve and protect the citizens with excellence, and we do that through partnerships and data-driven techniques that I'll talk about today in this presentation. Our first goal that we set relates to the professionalism and growth management pillar of the county, specifically for us, is our vacancy rate, and we set a goal of maintaining a vacancy rate below 15%. You see here we are on track and meeting that goal as we're at 9.9% with our vacancy rate, which is down 6% compared to last quarter of the fiscal year of 2024. We also set a goal of reducing our traffic and pedestrian fatalities by 5%. We're doing well in that arena as we have decreased our crash fatalities by 50%. Our pedestrian fatalities remain the same at three, but we're on track to meet that goal as well. From an internal perspective, we set a goal of providing 24 annual training opportunities related to technology for our personnel, and that associates also with the professional growth management pillar of the county. We're meeting that goal and on track. We've already had four training events. I'm sure we will complete that goal and meet that as well. That brings us to challenges and proposed solutions. Property theft, a crime that's overwhelming the metropolitan area. We're still doing well in that regard, but we have some disruption. Last year, during the fiscal year, we attempted the partnership with the DA's office and we did gun buybacks. Gun buybacks are hard to measure as it relates to effectiveness, so we wanted to change that technique. So this fiscal year, we're taking the approach to pass out gun safes so that our citizens can secure their weapons properly and hopefully deter theft and also reduce our crimes against persons because we also often saw those firearms that were stolen were used in crimes later against persons. Within that realm, we also continue to partner with our businesses to encourage them to buy into our real-time crime center. That's the RTCC acronym you see there, which allows us video access, and we've been using cameras to solve crimes in a vast amount of the last fiscal year. Moving down to the next challenge, it relates to a change in the state mandate related to training recruits. Previously, the training hours mandated were 408 hours, I believe. The mandate has changed to 800 hours. What does that do? That diminishes our opportunity to have the same amount of academy classes and push out the same amount of solo police officers to the streets. So how are we combating that? We're partnering with building and maintenance and the COO's office to identify space where we can run dual academies. I've already allotted resources as far as trainers go to make that standard happen. Once we get the space, I'm sure we'll continue to push out the same number of recruits that we've been doing. Lastly, establishing partnerships with the community and other agencies. We do well in that regard through our neighborhood watch meetings, our adult citizens police academy, and we recently started a junior citizens police academy, which includes the children from ages 8 to 16. The catch is for the children to participate, the parents have to come with them. So we're getting two birds with one stone in that regard. I'm pleased to report. Short term, we'll continue our neighborhood watch meetings. We'll continue to coffee with the chief. We have one coming up at Eggs Up Grill on October 25th from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. I expect to see the community there. We have a full scale public safety critical incident exercise that should be forthcoming. And I told you about the gun safe distribution events that will be forthcoming. Long term, we want to expand that footprint of the real-time crime center. Right now we have three people in a small office as we get the funding and construction underway. That's going to grow to something very impressive, and we'll continue to see these numbers grow.