All right.

We will bring the meeting to order.

First item of business is the Pledge of Allegiance.

And um Counselor Fort, can you help lead us?

Do we have approval of the remainder?

So moat.

Second.

All in favor of that motion, aye.

All opposed, nay.

All right, so that's unanimous.

And then we will call up Don Myers from the police department to discuss C One A.

Or Chief Boyce.

At the time, the only resource or the tool we had to bring a vehicle pursuit to a safe end were stop sticks.

Stopsticks were used quite frequently throughout the country as well as here in RPD for many years.

What we saw was that officers were getting killed throughout the country by deploying these stop sticks, as well as vehicles would continue to move forward and cause additional damage after being the tires being stopped by the stop sticks.

So it wasn't a very useful tool.

So RPD leadership, many, many years ago, we stopped using stop sticks.

And since then, early 2000s, we have not had anything in our inventory to address bringing vehicle pursuits to an end.

With that mindset and that history of Stop 6 here in the RPD, when I was selected as chief, I tasked my senior leadership team with identifying equipment that we could use here in the Capitol City to bring vehicle pursuits to a safe end and make sure that we are keeping our community safe as well as the officers that put their life on the line each and every day.

The recommendation to start looking at Star Chase was presented to me in April of 2025.

I started asking questions about this product, started talking to other chiefs throughout the country of what is Star Chase, and is Star Chase a very useful tool for the department.

So that leads me here to my PowerPoint here.

What is Star Chase?

It is a GPS-based tracking system.

It is almost just look, think of it as an air tag that law enforcement deploys on a vehicle that is fleeing a lawful traffic stop.

Or if we have probable calls to believe that a vehicle has committed a crime and the occupants within that need to be taken into custody, we can deploy Star Chase before a vehicle pursuit happens.

This is only a GPS tracker that is used in live real time.

It allows us as law enforcement to safely track a fleeing vehicle without engaging in a high speed pursuit.

This is very timely if you think back just last week.

Now thank goodness none of them was were initiated by RPD, but this is a thing that we must address here at RPD.

What will we do if we initiate a vehicle pursuit?

And how can we ensure that we keep our community safe when we initiate a vehicle pursuit?

When officers deploy one of these tags, and I have one here to show you what it looks like.

When they deploy that tag onto an offender's vehicle, it triggers and activate a GPS tracker.

From there, members of our real-time crime center, back in our detective division can safely monitor that vehicle in a very short period of time.

Thank you.

Is to hold offenders accountable and to bring a chase to a safe end while keeping our community safe.

Here is what a tracker looks like, and I'm going to pass it to Madam City Attorney, and you can pass it around.

That tracker is deployed from a launcher on the front of a patrol vehicle, and I'll get into that more here in a second.

You are asking what is the public safety benefits?

That is the number one goal with any equipment that we have here in the Raleigh Police Department is safety.

Safety for our community, safety for our officers that use this equipment.

I will tell you, Star Chase reduces the need for high-speed pursuits.

Once that tracker is attached to an offender's vehicle, we can safely back off that vehicle and not continue to follow it and encourage that violator to continue to drive in a very erratic manner from what we've seen.

We all can go on YouTube and see the destruction and a harm that a vehicle pursuit can cause in a city.

I don't want that as a chief.

My officers don't want that.

We as city leaderships don't want that here in the Capitol City.

It also decreases the risk to pedestrian, motorists, and officers by using Star Chase, because we can allow technology to do what it is intended to do and allow us to track that vehicle from a safe distance and not put the general public in any type of harm.

It also allows officers to disengage while maintaining situational awareness.

And what I mean by that is currently I have no resources to address bringing a vehicle pursuit to a safe end if it meets the threshold of our vehicle pursuit policy.

There's nothing else there.

They either got to let the vehicle go or they're going to initiate the vehicle pursuit, and there's a risk that that pursuit might end in some type of damage.

And I don't want that.

With Star Chase, the officer can make the decision like I've deployed Star Chase, and now I can quickly bag off this vehicle and hopefully bring this situation to a safe end.

That is the number one goal, safety.

This also supports pursuit reform and safety focused policing.

And what I mean by that is we can then take our own data from a vehicle pursuit.

We can analyze it, we can train our officers in knowing how to engage in a vehicle pursuit and how to bring it to a safe conclusion by using real data that we initiated that we have inside of RPD, and we'll get that data from the Star Chase tracker.

Operational benefits, real-time GPS tracking mapping.