Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
This Pre-Council meeting on October 13, 2026 (transcript states October 5th, creating a date discrepancy) focused on a detailed presentation by the Columbia Police Department regarding downtown crime statistics, resource deployment, enforcement strategies, and the relationship between reported crime and actual crime. The discussion aimed to contextualize a reported 47.8% increase in downtown reported crime over the past 12 months, with emphasis on understanding confounding variables such as increased enforcement, staffing, and proactive policing efforts.
All right, I'm gonna go ahead and call us to order. Um this is the October 5th, 2026 Columbia Pre-Council meeting. We have just a couple of things on our agenda today. Uh first up is our downtown public safety discussion. Um I just wanted like before we go into it to say like I've really appreciated seeing like all the collaboration happening uh for downtown events related to safety, but also just all awesome things. So I saw a lot of people out downtown this weekend, and that was really cool. So uh I'm hoping that this is kind of the start of maybe more of a cadence of updates, like not necessarily in response to incidents, but more like we were just in Chattanooga, and their police chief gets together apparently like with like their city maybe somebody in your administration and like the CID and it's kind of like a monthly or a quarterly sort of update. And I'm hoping that maybe this could be the start at both for downtown, but also just maybe updates of cadences. Doesn't have to be at a pre-council, it can be at a separate sort of update event. So I'm hoping that maybe this is us getting into that cadence, and I'll let you speak to that. So I'm gonna give it to you or Chief Schlute. Chief Chief Sleepy. All right. Well, uh and to kind of piggyback on what you said about chat and I think that could fit in very well naturally with the kind of quarterly update. In fact, I think we have one tomorrow on um the block by block program. So we could probably just mesh all that together when we do this quarterly meetings talk about the whole gambit of everything, not just the block by block stuff. Um so I'm gonna kind of just give a little, I don't I was trying to remember, but I don't remember when this got put on as an agenda item or what there's been a lot there's been nothing going on. There's been a lot going on. Um so I don't remember exactly why this got put on and when, but we did do a presentation last year about crime stats. Was that last November? It's November 4th or 5th, yeah. Um, to kind of try to talk to you how they're compiled, how the different categories work. It's very complex. Um this is a not as uh in the weeds presentation as that as far as all of those, but please feel free to ask questions because we're gonna really drill down on making sure everybody understands what the different crime categories are because those that really does make a difference in how this data is interpreted. Um Christopher and I already saw this morning that there's some misreporting about the crime stats downtown that crime's up 48%. That's not really the whole story, right? We have to have a conversation about what the different things are that we're seeing, enforcing crimes that are being reported versus crimes that we're discovering because we're downtown doing increased enforcement. Uh so kind of a continuation of the presentation we did last year, but we're only gonna touch back on like the previous year and talk about trends that we're seeing both daytime and nighttime, and then um how we think we've been able to move the needle in some of those areas. So I'll let Mark go ahead and start and and we can do it either way. You can stop us as we go if that's helpful. I don't think it's incredibly long presentation, but if you have a question in the moment, it might be better to ask, but we can we can proceed however you prefer. Okay. If I notice us getting too like long-winded on slide two, I might encourage us to continue going forward. So yeah. So I actually I listened to uh the November 4th or 5th presentation this morning, just to as kind of a primer and and and really the first kind of part of this presentation is um I think councilwoman Carroll, you mentioned in in the November meeting that that these crime sets need context um in them, and that and they're they are incredibly nuanced. Um, and so to provide some of the context.