Thank you.

Council members McShane and Kazemchak are the members of this committee, and so we will be hearing uh comments and uh getting questions from those committee members only today.

The first item on our agenda is presentation of the Frederick Police Department's budget.

Okay, make sure this there we go.

Huh.

All done.

Are you advancing it?

Okay.

So our year in review for 2025 will uh go over uh crime reduction.

And I do have Aaron, if you could pass these out to the committee members up there.

A packet was just some uh pertinent information.

But if you look um first at our year over year crime, we did a uh comparison 2023 to 2024, and you'll see that we saw uh pretty significant decreases in our major crime category.

So we saw a 37% decrease in arson, 4.5 decrease in burglary, uh a 60% decrease in homicides, 15% decrease in motor vehicle theft, 40% in theft from vehicle, 5.8% decrease in.

Can I ask you to move the microphone a little closer, please?

Yes.

Um the one area that we did see uh uh an increase.

We did have two uh additional firearm discharges uh in 2024 as compared to 2023.

So we went from 23 to 25, so we saw an 8.7% increase.

Um a very, very significant decrease in our opioid overdoses, 55.5 percent.

Um, I think a big part of that is due to the wide distribution of Narcan around the city and the county and its its availability um to the general public.

So um our number our crime numbers were looking uh very good from last year, uh the year over year comparison.

Gee, do we keep numbers on um the number of times officers because we wouldn't have anything else use an ARCAN a day?

Yeah, I mean we do keep those numbers.

I can tell you it's definitely not daily.

Um it might be if I had to guess maybe 30 or 40 times last year we used Narcans, yeah, yeah.

I'm trying to remember from the last crime meeting, but um it's it's maybe once a week.

So really it's it's probably from the general public having access to that.

Yeah.

And it's you know, it it makes it very difficult for us to track because if someone does have an overdose and a member of the public gets there, administers Narcan and the person gets up and walks away.

We we we can't capture that, but I can tell you this is a national trend that we're seeing.

It's not unique to Frederick.

So I think that this what the widespread Narcan across the country is really um driving down the number of fatalities.

I don't know that it's driving down the number of overdoses, but definitely the number of fatalities.

Yeah, and I know that it's something that your department was in favor of expanding the people who could have mark in.

So I mean it's a good thing.

I just was just it does make it tough for us to track the actual numbers for sure.

Thank you.

Absolutely.

Um we'll touch on some of the advancements in technology and um recently minted Captain Laps sitting next to me, has really been leading the effort on a lot of our technology technology advancements from our new um CAD system to our new RMS system.

Um, as you know that the entire department has body cameras.

Um we recently uh upgraded our body cameras, um, our tasers, uh the axon training platform that we use.

We actually have invited the community recently uh through the Chief's Advisory Board to take part in a um use of force and de-escalating de-escalation training uh using um our new uh axon, remind me the name of the X on VR, the the virtual reality, um uh which we we think will even further help us um in our de-escalation training with recruits and at in service training.

Um Aaron, is there anything you wanted to touch on with any technology?

No, that's a good nutshell.

Um our most recent uh tech that we rolled out is called Good SAM.

You guys have heard of that probably ask the same thing for the microphone.

Yes, or our most recent technology we rolled out is called Good SAM.

It's a connector to the public when they call for police services where we can send them uh SMS text messages direct, and we actually had a pretty positive case with that this year where a young child reached out to uh our our dispatch center and we were able to communicate with them behind the scenes through text.

So that was good.

Thank you.

And then one of the things I think it might be later in the presentation, but one of the things we're really trying to work on now is our DFR or drone as first responder program, which we think will go a long way in keeping both the community and our responding officers safer.

So it's a program that we're building uh kind of piece by piece.

Um but I think once it's fully deployed, um, we're gonna see much quicker response times than we already have, which are still pretty quick.

Um, but we're gonna be able to get some actual video images of um incident scenes as officers are responding so they know what they're walking into.

Um and so I I really look forward to um being able to demonstrate that new technology once we get it up and running.

And then the third point is uh as you know, we're really really big in our community outreach and engagement, whether it's through the Chiefs Advisory Board, um, you know, I actually I just came from the uh the ARC where the crisis car team is presenting to Key City Rotary today on the work that they've been doing.

Um and so uh just we continue to stay very engaged with the community and really make them a part of all of our programs and initiatives.

So some of our priorities for uh this upcoming fiscal year, um you know, first and foremost, our are uh as as much of the cool stuff as we do, um crime reduction, especially violent crime is always gonna be our number one priority.

Um I I I say we're lucky, maybe luck is not the right word.

Um, but we're lucky that in Frederick, you know, violent crime is not our number one um issue.