The Syracuse City Council held a meeting on February 11, 2026, to receive a deep dive presentation from the police chief on the department's annual report, key performance indicators, crime statistics, staffing challenges, and future considerations. The chief presented data on training, response times, case clearance, community engagement, and staffing levels. Council members discussed retention, crossing guard needs, and the impending dispatch service cost increase. The meeting concluded with a motion to enter closed session, which was approved.
Also receive some follow-up from the parent of that individual. On the right, you'll see competitive grant awards that we've received. These these just validate the fact that we are proactive and we are having measurable success because there were many persons who sought out these grants that exceeded the actual amount of funds that were available. So state asset forfeiture grant, we were awarded 33,000. The alcohol drug free equipment fund 20,000. Those funds are going to be used to modernize what we have in place, upgrade our camera systems in our vehicle, which improves transparency but also improves prosecution. And then you can see that you know, with the 33,000, um we're establishing a bike control program that's also part of a community policing effort. Um we purchase some advanced crime scene investigation equipment that's also works nicely with our um traffic accident reconstruction, and then we are in the process of trying to identify some advanced technologies to assist us with report writing in an effort to reduce the amount of time our officers spend committed to report writing as opposed to serving community. So this is just I believe some illustrations of what setting the base looks like. So in this and or in this uh deep dive, we're gonna look at uh couple different topics and reports, key performance indicators, statistics, future considerations, and then um if at any time you all have questions, please stop me. And if I'm talking too long, just hit say like next or something like that. All right, so the annual reports they're available on the city's official website. They can be located by using the um going to the police department website, going down to the bottom right side, and you'll find the the tab that'll take you to our annual reports. I'm gonna cover some statistics here, but the annual reports go much deeper. Um, and if you're having troubles falling asleep at night, this would be a good place to start. So let's talk about our key performance indicators or our expectations vision statement. Um, Syracuse Police Forum is professional well training community enforced that responds effectively to crime and public concern. When we look at the bottom there, some of our um some of the indicators that may point us in the direction that we're hitting those results, and one of those is the uh amount of training our officers receive. Um, 100% of our employees exceeded our state mandated training mandated training, which is 40 hours. Um, on average, our sworn officers received over 109 hours of training during 2025. That right there, you'll see 77% of supervisors receive greater than 15 hours of supervisor specific training. Um, this is training that is designed to help us manage risk, improve leadership, improve management. Um, our target for supervisor training is to get 100% with regards to that 15 hours additional training. So we have room for improvement there. 81% of our urgent calls were responded to within target time frame. Um, our goal there was 85%. Now, on average, we fell actually we succeeded because on average our response time is five minutes and 58 seconds, and response time is from the time that dispatch radios the officer to respond to their arrival time. Um so we do have some room for improvement there as well. But again, on average, we are five minutes and 58 seconds. And the priority one calls are these in progress calls where you see police officers oftentimes turn their lights on, or it could be a lost child, um crime in progress, vehicle crash with accidents, those are gonna be our priority one calls. 900% of cases assigned to investigators are resolved within target time frame. Um, resolved just means that the case is no longer being investigated and it has a closure assigned to it. So that could be with an arrest or prosecution of some kind. That could be enacted, meaning there's just no further leads for them to follow up on, or it could be an exceptional clearance. Say a victim contacts us and says, I know I don't want to be a victim, I don't want to participate in court proceedings. So that would that would close the case out there. Alex, do you have any idea what the percentages are things that just there's no further leads? How often that happens. I just have no concept of what that is. Is that 10%, 100%, 2%? Um, I couldn't, I don't know that I put a percentage on, but I'll tell you a large, a large volume of calls that are at the patrol level. Um, there just are no leads. It's something that occurred in the past, and maybe it was a delayed reporting event, you know, um vehicle burger, for example. They don't have any cameras outside, nobody saw this, they didn't discover it for a week or two when they're rifling through their car. So I I would say, you know, it it happens quite frequently. Those usually stay at the patrol level because there's no no point in forwarding those on. That helps, thank you. Officers are courteous, service driven, and respected by the community. Um, you know, one of the one of the ways we we engage the community is understanding that um some persons will suffer from some type of mental challenges. Um, and because of that, we really emphasize our officers receive um crisis intervention training.