This work session, held on June 11, 2026, focused on addressing crime trends, police staffing, and strategies for crime reduction. Police Chief Henderson presented detailed data on calls for service, patrol deployment, crime statistics, and a stratified crime reduction strategy. Commissioners asked questions about technology, community trust, legislative needs, and resource allocation. No formal votes were taken, but additional data was requested for follow-up.
Good afternoon, Mayor. This is a warp session to help address uh answer questions with regards to standing trends, crime trends, and strategies to reducing crime. And I am happy to turn it over to Chief Henderson to lead us in the presentation. Thank you, City Manager. Good afternoon, mayor, commissioners, city manager, deputy city managers, and chief of staff. Appreciate the opportunity to be here to really uh discuss. I think it's something that we haven't done in a while to really discuss kind of our staffing, how our staffing is deployed, um, kind of where we're at this year thus far with crime, and then also kind of what my vision is and where I want to head towards uh as far as our crime uh reduction strategy. So um what you'll see it'll be a multifaceted approach. So I'll go ahead and step into it. So uh the objectives for today we'll talk about cost of service, staffing update, crime trends, and then like I said, the crime reduction strategy. Uh so I'll start first with our citizen generated calls of service. So most of the data you'll see here is from January 1 to May 31st of this year. So the chart on the left shows that our calls for service are trending up. So the 2026 were about 49,500 calls of service already this year, and those are citizen generated. So this does not include self-initiated calls for service. So this is when a citizen either calls 911 or calls a non-emergency line and request for an officer to either contact them or to respond to their address or location. It's up 10% um since pre-COVID. So and that's what we're noticing that it's trending up in that manner. The chart to the right shows the patrol obligation by district. Uh so you'll see starting from the left, central, east, west. Um, the red um portion of the graph shows the percentage of time officers spend in those districts on citizen generated costs or service. So in central, they're spending 20% of the time. Um, in east, they spend 50% of their available time, and then west is 60% of their available time on citizen generated costs or service. The green will be proactive. Um, as you can see, downtown, they have a little bit more flexibility because they're um they're not necessarily focused on the costs or service coming in, they're focused on the level of activity. If you look at the number of locations we have downtown that have a lot of people at events like Dayer Ballpark, Schuster Center, Oregon District, Levitt Pavilion. So downtown staffing model is not just based on cost of service, it's based on some of those high visibility needs that are downtown. East, um the the green is a little around 10%, it looks like for proactive time, and west is around the same. And then the gray portion of the bar shows the time that officers spend on admin time. So that's complete and report that's going to the fuel line or taking care of other administrative duties that are required. Um, I can tell you at times that's probably the most difficult thing to track, just because sometimes some officers may take care of admin stuff while they're available for a call for service or in between calls where they're actually free. So um, and when we're looking at this stuff uh at this data, because everything we have, this is based on actual data that our business analyst is able to pull from the CAD system, our computer aided dispatch system. Um they're pulling the actual labor hour spent on each call or each call type, and that's how they're able to pull this information. Best practices, um, the international county uh managers, uh city and county managers association um says that any time you're over that 60% threshold, you're essentially a reactive police department, or you're only reacting reactive in nature and not very proactive in nature. And it's difficult at times when you're at that threshold to do some of the things that we need to do, like you know, participating in uh community engagement or non-enforcement events or attending community events, but at the same time, you know, I think all myself included, you know, we all try to make sure that uh we're always trying to do the best we can with what resources we have. So then I'll move on to patrol staffing. So I know there's been some discussion. Um we've been on the 10-hour day schedule, I think since 2016-2017, um, which was a big change in how we previously deploy deployed our resource resources. We were on eight-hour shifts, and we had three shifts in each district of eight-hour days. So in the I think it was 2016-2017 is when we changed the 10-hour shifts, and we went to four reliefs in east and west district. Um, for a short time, I think we had three reliefs downtown for 10 hour days, but then we transitioned to two 10-hour reliefs downtown to provide more visibility during the peak hours when there's a lot of people out and about. So at the time that worked pre-COVID, um, that deployment strategy. So we tried something different this year. We switched from the four 10 hour reliefs to three 10 hour reliefs. Um, what we um were hearing and seeing is that um officers felt that there was not basically the roll call sizes were not necessarily on a larger size. So when officers are show up for the beginning of the shift, um, at times there would be only six officers sitting there. Well, there were still officers on the street also, but at times it's one of those things is you only sometimes you only see what's right there next to you or beside you. So um, and also to look at how can we kind of flatten some of our issues with paying overtime, with having to uh require people to come in to work over time and covering other gaps. So we wanted to test to see if we could flatten that out some. So we switched the three, 10 hour reliefs.