On February 12, 2026, the Clayton County Board of Commissioners held day two of the Clayton Performance Reviews, where department leadership presented performance metrics for fiscal year 2025 quarters two and three. Deputy Chief Operating Officer Landry Merkison opened the session, inviting citizen questions via CPRquestions@claytoncountyga.gov. Departments reported on progress, challenges, and future initiatives across public safety, technology, community development, and human services.
Clayton County Police Department (Chief Kevin Roberts)
Fire and Emergency Services (Chief not named)
Information Technology (Deputy CIO Matthew Hutcherson)
Grants Administration (Grant Administrator Linda Boswell)
Office of Resilience and Sustainability (Interim Director Fong Wynn)
Community Development (Assistant Director Cheryl Brooks)
Clayton County Library System (speaker not named)
Youth Services (Administrator Sierra Dunn)
Human Resources (Manager Carol Lowe)
So good morning, citizens of Clayton County, and I was my pleasure to welcome you to day two of the Clayton Performance Reviews. My name is Landry Merkison, and I have the pleasure of serving as the Deputy Chief Operating Officer for the Clayton County Board of Commissioners. Just as a reminder, our Clayton Performance Reviews is an opportunity for our department leadership to come before you and their colleagues to report out on their performance measurements and what their progress has been throughout fiscal year 25 for quarters two and for quarter three. So today you'll hear from half of our leadership. As I said, this is day two, so the other half went yesterday. And they'll update you on their progress to date as well as provide us with any challenges and obstacles that they see moving forward. As we move through today's presentations, if anyone has any questions, citizens can feel free to send their questions to CPR questions at Clayton County GA.gov. And we will make sure that we route those to the appropriate leadership, and they will get a response to you. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome our first presenter up this morning, Chief Kevin Roberts from Clayton County Police Department. Chief Greetings on behalf of the Clayton County Police Department. And as we talk about the police department, who are we? We're an agency that serves and protects all citizens with excellence, and we do that through partnership and collaboration by reviewing statistical information. The first goal I want to talk about is our vacancy rate. As a department, we've set a goal of maintaining the vacancy rate below 15%. And as you look at the presentation, you will see in quarters two and three, we have met that goal, and we're on track. Quarter two, we maintain a vacancy rate of 10.8%. In quarter three, we maintain a vacancy rate of 12.9%. Under the quality of life pillar, one of our main goals is to reduce our pedestrian fatalities by 5%. We see some disruption in this area as we've seen an increase in our year-to-date fatalities. Our pedestrian fatalities increased by 45% from 11 to 16, and our vehicular fatalities increase by 23% from 13 to 16. To put it in perspective from a quarterly review, our quarter two saw a hundred percent increase in vehicular fatalities from four to eight, and pedestrian fatalities increased from four to six, which was a 50% increase. Quarter three, we saw our vehicular fatalities decrease back to four, which was a hundred percent decrease, and our pedestrian fatalities saw no change as we had six. We'll talk about how we can uh reduce those numbers a little bit later in the presentation. We also have made it a goal under the professional growth and management pillar to ensure that your personnel are adequately trained. We established the goal of having 24 training events throughout the year. We're on track to meet that goal, and during quarter two, we provided four training opportunities in the form of three training bulletins and one video for our RMS, which is our records management system. It's the system that officers use to complete our reports and store that information as well. In quarter three, we provided seven training opportunities in the form of three training bulletins and four videos as our technology is always trained, changing. Challenges and proposed solutions. This relates also our first challenge relates to our professional growth pillar in the county, attrition and retirements. We've entered a window within our department where we're seeing a lot of our seasoned veterans move towards retirement, which is a good thing for them, but not so much for the agency as we are young and we lose a lot of knowledge and experience with these retirements. So how are we overcoming that or trying to overcome that challenge through additional training? Well I mean by training is I've started a transition policy to where when I know a seasoned employees is about to retire, I'm finding their replacement early and telling them at least 30 days out. This employees are retiring. I intend to promote you in 30 days. I need you to start transitioning with that leader so we don't lose all of that great knowledge out of the door. We're also taking a different approach through our volunteers and police services program. It's an opportunity for our citizens to come volunteer their time at the police department in places where we won't have to assign a sworn or non-sworn employees. And finally, our reserve security officers are composed of those retirees who want to come back to the police department and offer their services in a part-time capacity, such as investigations, our statistical unit, and our community affairs unit. And we've seen success. I've not been able to get them all back, but I'm working on them. As far as our mandate process, the state agency for training has increased the period of mandate. They have doubled it from 400 hours to 800, which presents a challenge in training because we need an additional facility to have an overlapping training class, but through partnerships with the Office of Resiliency and Parks and Rec. We have an opportunity to provide a temporary facility to complete our training and get those folks trained up to par. Lastly, we talked about the fatalities. All of that is good police work. We've added folks to our traffic unit. We'll be doing directed patrols in the key areas to reduce those numbers. I just want to take a quick moment to talk about a real-time crime center. Those are the folks that use our cameras in the county to investigate crimes, and you see here that they have assisted with 427 investigations over two quarters, two and three.