Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Public Safety Committee.

We're so happy to have you with us, those who are watching us uh on air.

And we are in our wonderful committee uh room here.

And uh Madam Uh Clark, would you just call our roll, please?

Yes, Madam Chair Scipio.

I'm here.

Vice Chair Hall.

Councilmember Joyner.

Present.

And Councilmember Andrew Bowen.

Here thank you very much.

First of all, I'd like to say uh good afternoon, especially to the members of our public safety arena.

Uh our Chief Mayo and his wonderful team, and Chief Penn and his wonderful team.

Thank you all for being here.

Today we have a fairly short agenda.

We have uh no consent items today.

And so we'll go right to our general uh agenda, and we will start with G1.

Item G1 information on police department grant award from Firehouse Subs Foundation for automated external defibrillators good afternoon, Chair Scipio, members of the committee and and council.

The police department's been fortunate enough to have been awarded a grant of 12,560 from firehouse subs.

That grant will be used to purchase eight AEDs for the various police department facilities.

And we have received these funds already or no, no, no, they will reimburse.

Oh, this is reimbursable.

Okay.

Uh is there any discussion or questions for the chief on this particular grant?

Good afternoon.

Are these gonna be located at the different uh stations?

Are they gonna be out in the community at all?

No, no, they'll be used at the police department facilities.

This is an information item, correct?

So we're just needing to accept that, not having to vote on it, correct?

So thank you, Chief.

We'll just accept that.

Thank you, and congratulations on getting the grant and continue getting grants.

Thank you.

All the grants we can get, we'll love to have them.

Thank you.

Item G2, 2024 Citywide Crime Review.

So it's me again.

Yes.

Uh what I would like to do at this point is um direct your attention towards the PowerPoint slide.

Just wanted to give you an idea of kind of what happened in our city in 2024 in comparison to 2023.

I'm gonna start with violent crime.

As you can see, homicides were down 32 percent, robberies 8.6, aggravated assaults, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts.

You look just a little bit lower than that.

You'll notice that total crime in our city was down 10 percent in comparison to 2023.

Of course, we're all happy about that, but there's still more work to be done.

And then I want to draw your attention to clearance rate.

So the clearance rate is 85 percent on homicide cases compared to the state average of 45 percent and a national average of 57 percent.

So while violent crime is down, particularly in homicides, when those decide to do that, we are we're being extremely successful at locating arresting and clearing those cases, which is what we're proud of.

And then from there, I'm gonna show you the employee rate where in 2024 we had a net gain of 23 sworn officers.

So that number we started off in January 1, 2024, by December 31st, 2024, we had added 23 Swarm employees, which we're extremely proud of.

As you know, we have been operating at a net loss for a previous year, so this was uh very good news for us and our community.

Thank you, Chief.

This is uh some good news.

How close are we to being um fully important?

So we're about 88 employees on the sworn side, and we're working hard to fill those.

Um we're we're getting good news.

Applications are up, uh, folks are working hard in the field and in the backgrounds to get them out on the street.

We also are receiving a lot of interest from lateral employees, uh, other agencies who are looking at Winston Salem and and they like what they see.

They like what we're doing, they like to support that the department gets from both our community and council and our city leadership.