All right, six o'clock.

We're gonna go ahead and get started with uh this evening's study session.

Uh the first item is a division of police update.

Uh Chief Sucher.

All right, thank you for having us here tonight for our yearly uh police division update.

I've got some things here, some new information, some things have been presented in some uh other public forums, but uh definitely wanted to include that uh here tonight.

We've got our organizational structure here uh for the past year that hasn't changed uh since since last year, and we do not have any plans to change that in the immediate future.

Next slide, please.

Our current sworn staffing, we've got 32 sworn personnel, uh, three in administration, six sergeants, uh, four in road patrol, one in criminal investigations, one administrative sergeant.

He works uh three days on the street and then three days in an administrative role to uh supplement some of the administrative uh training tasks and uh fleet and vehicle maintenance.

I've got 23 officers, 18 assigned to road patrol, uh, five in criminal investigations, and the only change you will see here this year uh we've added the uh one proactive detective.

This position uh was in the bulk currency task force, and when that task force folded, uh we brought that detective back in house to deal with community concerns, uh proactive vice work.

Basically, as soon as real time complaints come in that are issues in hotels or problem residences, we uh send a detective out to address those issues.

And then our newly uh appointed crime prevention officer this year, uh Officer Brittany Blackford.

Our current civilian staffing, we've got 12 civilians, we have one support services manager, uh, nine authorized for nine public safety specialists, also known as our dispatchers, uh, one administrative assistant uh that handles our CLIA accreditation and a lot of the budget duties, um, and uh administrative assistant to our investigative investigative section, and uh she handles all the property room quartermaster and then all of our body worn camera and NCAR video redactions.

This past year we were able to celebrate uh two of our staff members.

Uh Detective Tim Christian was selected as officer of the year, and PSS Mary Beth Dyke was selected as our employee civilian employee of the year for 2025.

Tim's currently assigned in that uh uh detective position with almost 10 years here at uh VPD.

And uh Mary Beth is assigned to day shift.

She joined us in 2021 and is part of our training staff and peer support team as well.

Moving on to our statistics from last year.

You can see there uh we went up in almost uh every in every category except for alarm drops.

Our proactive work has increased drastically in the in the past year as we've kind of shifted some models on uh on dealing with community concerns.

Our public safety specialists processed uh nearly 7,000 911 calls, and they answered uh over 20,000 non-emergency phone calls for approximately 75 uh non-emergency phone calls a day.

Their numbers were down just a little bit uh this year.

2025 accomplishments.

Uh we got the ball rolling and have now implemented uh police only drone technology, so we now have our own dedicated drone.

Uh previously, when calls uh called for a uh the response for a drone, we had to do a call out, people had to respond in.

It was kind of an on-call creating a delay for the our drone team.

Uh now we have a deployable drone from our cruisers.

So, real time when an event occurs, we can automatically get a drone up in the air and uh basically expedite that response for for uh drone usage.

We developed our internship program last year.

Uh we had our first intern from the University of Dayton, who was also a Van Day Butler grad, so that worked out really well.

Learned a lot from that.

Um, that our first internship on how we can improve uh what was good, uh, what we can get better at.

Uh so we've already had some students interested in joining us this summer for additional internships.

We also expanded our current wellness program.

Uh we have now uh mandated physical fitness testing uh and uh that that was uh it's very uh there's a lot of um competition with that.

So when we uh brought that on, people did not want to finish last, wanted to do well, so there's uh some healthy friendly competition with our uh physical fitness testing.

Uh we have our mandatory mental health wellness checks now.

Uh every member of our staff uh meets with a mental health professional uh once a year.

And then we also have an on-site physical trainer for our uh any any injury rehabilitation, uh, can develop fitness plans and nutrition planning.

So somebody's got a sore back, uh, when our trainers there on site, they can uh work on us right there at the building.

Uh the graphic there on the right, that's uh our core uh wellness committee.

Uh they are responsible for this program and the success that it's had so far, and uh kudos to that group.

Um there's been a lot of uh good buy-in, and they definitely took the task to heart and uh put together a great program.

When we talk about opportunity, uh some people may see uh the area of recruitment and law enforcement as a challenge, which it can be, uh, but we see that as an opportunity.

Our recruiting team has been very active in recruiting from area police academies all the way up north to Salina, St.

Mary's.

Uh, we we go all over.

We try to hit uh a target population to the north.

There's a little less competition with agencies to the to the south in the Cincinnati and Columbus region, and uh majority of our recent applicants were due to face-to-face contact that we had with them in a police academy.

So they've done a great job with that with uh outreach for our uh recruiting efforts.

Um our pilot program continues continues to expand.

Uh that's our police inspiring leaders of tomorrow program.

It took over uh replaced the former Explorer program.

We recently had an event at the high school where Officer Blackford uh was at the high school for all the lunch periods and interacted with dozens, if not uh a couple hundred students.

Uh she actually ran out of handouts and had to go get more for some of the students.

So our youth outreach programs uh continuing to grow.

We're currently uh in a in the process of uh completing a uh a study for revitalizing our mission statement principles of operation and our core values.