I got Pepsi, that's my power drink too.

I knew can be a good thing.

Thank you.

I'm all set.

Thank you.

You came prepared.

We need a paper table.

Yeah, we do.

All right.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Um, we're here to start the budget hearing for the Department of Police.

Um I am Donna Moore, Chair of Safety Committee.

I am joined by my fellow counselors.

Councillor Hudson, Counselor Jones Rouser, Counselor Never say right, right.

Aaron Wright.

Counselor Caldwell, Nave, President Paniagua, uh, Counselors Monto and Majuk.

And I'll let you guys introduce yourself and take the take the lead here.

All right, thank you very much for having us.

I appreciate it.

With me today is First Deputy Chief Rich Trudel and Lieutenant Jen Grimmy, both uh very instrumental in putting together this budget.

We put together to uh uh to kind of walk through some of these things, uh a presentation that'll be on the screen over here, uh just over uh counselor Hudson's uh shoulder.

So a bunch of folks uh as I mentioned, Chief Trudell was was uh deeply involved with this as long with uh Jen Grimmy, Lieutenant Jen Grimmy, Evan Loving, Stacey Jennis, and uh Julie Castile Castellito that uh really helped to create this uh budget.

We looked at a lot of data over the last five years or so to try to put this uh to budget together as as uh as uh best that we possibly could.

So I really want to give them a shout out first because they put a tremendous amount of work on.

There was a lot of meetings about this.

And and the other thing that we also looked at is in the future, as first deputy chief uh and and Lieutenant Grimmy work on this budget with those folks up there is how can we also present solutions the next time that we come to this?

When we look at calls for service, how can we consolidate things?

How can we present uh solutions over the next fiscal year to ultimately um present more than just uh ask for money but also solutions for for some things?

So we have some ideas that that we're working on, and uh as the year goes on, we'll be sure to present those all to you.

In terms of department staffing, this is uh this goes back to July of 2019.

The staffing has been on uh on a decline here, but uh I'll show you here in a few minutes that uh although it's been on decline, there's been incredible work by the sworn and civilian members of the Syracuse Police Department to uh to answer calls for service, conduct investigations, and then do support operations to keep the police department uh providing quality services.

So the sworn uh personnel are deployed uh in these areas in the orange in the orange graph, that's the uniform bureau that's overseen by uh Deputy Chief Jim Milana.

He has uh approximately 65% of the of the department uh with respect to sworn personnel.

The support services bureau is overseen by uh Deputy Chief uh Jason Tom, and then the investigations bureau is overseen by Deputy Chief David Metz, and then obviously uh then you have the the chief's office as well.

So three hundred and sixty-four total sworn uh personnel, and this is the deployment throughout the department.

Uh you know, the as I mentioned at the beginning, I think this is a good opportunity to to highlight some of the great work that the police department is doing.

This is a call, this is calls for services compared to other areas.

I get this question quite quite frequently.

That how uh how do we compare it to other agencies?

This is just one 24-hour period.

Uh 500 calls for service, those are calls that come into 911, but then also self-initiated activities where officers are conducting traffic to traffic stops, doing property checks, what we call COPRA curves.

These those are our walking beats that that have become uh cornerstone for our reduction in gun violence, but also community engagement.

So a lot of great work that uh that gets done here, and you can just see the the sheer volume of calls is as uh compared to other agencies, what uh Syracuse Police Department is ultimately responsible, uh responsible for the uh the you know one thing that also comes up uh quite frequently, but this isn't this is an area of of progress.

I've said many times that progress is not a finish line, it's a responsibility.

But one area is ultimately how long does it take for for folks to get uh police officers to get to a call for service?

But then also there was a uh a change in our dispatch policy protocol, and and the commanders uh and supervisors for the police department did an excellent job implementing this this new change, and this has helped significantly reduce our our calls or our wait time for people to ultimately get uh get involved.

A lot of self-initiated activity that's that's going on.

I think the the one that I particularly want to highlight, these are everything in the police world is an acronym, but in the top left-hand corner, the the COPs, those are our Copra curve stops.

One of the things that we've heard over the years is we'd like to see more officers out in the actual streets uh doing walking beats.

And and this has been a uh a project that that came through um Latif, the mayor's office to reduce gun violence, Pablo when he was here, Chief Trudel.

There's a lot of folks that worked on this.

But but increasing our foot patrol presence has been something that's drastically improved over the last uh three years.

This is the 2025, the 2025 highlights.

You take a moment just to recognize some of the folks.

We have our support services folks that do all the training for the police department.

They've been putting through two police academies a year, tremendous amount of work, but that includes our Calia requirements.

The the police department was just re-accredited for Calia.

We're also that's a federal accreditation, then we also have a state level accreditation.

But with that comes a lot of training requirements.

We we uh encourage the training requirements, that's how we get professional police services.