The Safety and Licensing Committee met 07/13/2022. They received several updates from Police Chief Todd Thomas.
The first was the 2022 Appleton Police Department Mid-Year Report. This was basically a three-page summary of significant events from 2022. Chief Thomas did not go through it in detail. The first page talks about
- Recruitment and retention
- The Traffic Safety Officer
- The pilot program for the Crisis Response Team
- American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding for the Safer Communities Law Enforcement program
The Performance Indicators on page two were new. The Police Department had talked with Mayor Woodford about providing some kind of snapshot or dashboard of information that the Council might be interested in looking at. They came up with three areas to highlight:
- Mental health calls and responses
- The work the Special Investigative Unit is doing
- Traffic data
- Preventative crime contacts broken out by district
The third page talked about what the Police Department planned to focus on in 2023. He noted that it was just a rough draft and might undergo some minor changes before they got to budget presentations and discussions, but he thought it was pretty solid.
He opened things up for questions.
Alderperson Sheri Hartzheim (District 13) understood it was not addressed in the report but asked if the police department was still having issues obtaining ammunition.
Chief Thomas answered that the cost was going up dramatically. 2022’s budget for ammunition was $35,000 and they anticipated a similar cost next year. The challenge was not obtaining ammunition; the problem was just that it was extremely expensive and the cost had not yet come down.
Alderperson Hartzheim asked if the budget was on track for this year, and Chief Thomas told her it was
There were no further questions and the committee moved on to discussing the Police Department’s completion of the 2022 Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) application.
Chief Thomas told the committee this was a grant APD got every year and it was actually included in their budget. APD’s portion was a little over $11,000 in total with another $11,000 going to Outagamie County.
Every year, the police department changes what they use the money for. There are some federal restrictions, so they could not use it for things like military equipment. In the past, they have used it to outfit their squad cars and similar such thing. This year they were going to use the money to replace some of the traffic cameras which are extremely pricey and need some updating. The current cameras presented IT challenges, and this upgrade would help alleviate some of the workload on IT.
The committee members had no questions about that grant, so they moved on to the updated about APD’s Safer Communities Grant Allocation from the Wisconsin DOA.
Chief Thomas said several months ago the Governor’s Office allocated several million dollars across the state, mostly to large and medium-sized law enforcement agencies and sheriff’s departments. APD’s portion of that grant was $225,000.
They had a lot discussions with the mayor and the Finance Department on how they could get the biggest impact from this money. Because it was a one-time grant, they wanted to make sure that used it on something that would result in a big impact and perhaps also help out with the upcoming 2023 budget which going to be a challenging budget.
One of the biggest issues they’ve experienced over the years which they haven’t been able to fix because of the cost is running the Mobile Digital Communicators (MDCs) in their squad cars. Chief Thomas said that, in layman’s terms, they were currently essentially trying to run 50 megawatts of information through a 5-megawatt pipe. They were going to use this money to upgrade to a high performing Cradlepoint router. He said that most police agencies use Cradlepoint because they need to have that large of a router to run all the different systems and technology that they have in MDCs.
MDCs are literally working offices that run multiple programs, take videos, looking things up statewide, and enter reports. There are a lot of programs running simultaneously and without Cradlepoint there have been times that it takes half an hour for everything to boot up and officers to get logged in at the start of their shift. Additionally, sometimes MDCs shut down and they have to take the squad car out of service because officers can’t do their work without a functioning MDC.
They were going to use this grant money toward outfitting all the MDCs in their squad cars with Cradlepoint routers which had a lifespan of 10-15 years.
The committee members had no questions on that, so then moved on to Directors Reports. Chief Thomas had a couple updates to give in regard to that.
The first was an update on the Traffic Safety Officer position. Officer Ryan McCord had been in the position for a little over a month. In the first month he performed 1,200 traffic stops, wrote 40 citations, and issued 84 warnings mainly in the city’s high complaint areas.
The police department had some officers who were able to work overtime due to grant money APD had received, so Officer McCord had coordinated enforcement with those officers. He had also worked with the state patrol. The state patrol had an airplane up for a while, and Officer McCord coordinated with them in enforcing speed and reckless driving on 41 and 441.
The police department had been monitoring what he did and had already determined they needed to adjust his work hours. He had been working from 3PM to 11PM, but they realized he needed to work earlier in the day, so he changed to working from 11AM to7PM. This change allowed him to high some of the more high-complaint areas at busier times in the early afternoon and mid-day. They were going to continue monitoring that.
Officer McCord also started to work on putting some presentations together, and the Police Department created an email address for people to send complaints to. He had been doing a lot of working and keeping very busy.
He had also been working a lot of accidents that come across other officer’s screens. If another officer got a call to a crash, Officer McCord would go and take that so the other officer could be free to do other work. He had been as busy as they thought he would be and very productive.
Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) asked if Chief Thomas had any sense yet as to whether the increased attention on traffic and noise violations in the downtown corridor had affected repeat offenders.
Chief Thomas answered that Officer McCord was using the grant paid overtime officers to saturate the downtown area to make sure they had a visible presence, especially on busy nights when there was a lot of traffic. They were going to be recording information on that area and presenting a report in a few months as budget time drew close. Hopefully that would demonstrate the impact of the Traffic Safety Officer position.
Alderperson Schultz pushed a little and asked if Chief Thomas had any sense, even anecdotally, that the community was understanding that there had been a shift in enforcement for violations of noise downtown or what it taking a while for people to understand that there was renewed attention.
Chief Thomas responded that he didn’t really know, although he hoped people were beginning to understand. He said the Police Department had wanted to give the Traffic Safety Officer a month or so to get his feet under him and set up the type of presentations he would be giving before pushing him out in a more public-facing role. Once that happened, he thought people might become more aware of the renewed attention on downtown noise enforcement.
Finally, he finished up by talking about the $5,000 lateral hiring bonuses they had implemented in an effort to recruit the best employees they could. There was a lot of recruitment going on across the state and law enforcement departments were trying to become more creative as a way to stand out from other agencies. A lot of agencies were starting to put out sighing bonuses for lateral transfers because of how beneficial lateral transfers were. An officer who laterally transferred did not need to go to the recruit academy which resulted in a savings to the Police Department of about $20,000 for every lateral transfer.
One of the things that the Safer Communities Grant could be used for was hiring bonuses. They knew that lot of agencies were going to start doing that and some were already offering bonuses up to $10,000. They also knew that the pool of candidates who were willing to leave their current department to come to a different department was probably pretty small and would probably eventually dry up. APD’s goal was to get out there first, make a splash with the media, and get the good candidates to at least take a look at them.
Additionally, APD had 9 officers serving on a recruitment team that was engaged a process similar to that of executive headhunting. They had 6 candidates that they were in the process of personally contacting, meeting, calling in for tours, showing them around the city, and basically trying to get them interested in coming to Appleton before another department connected with them.
The hiring bonuses were $5,000 and the money for that came out of salary savings. APD currently had 5 openings so they had plenty of salary savings. Additionally, factoring in the hiring bonus, every lateral transfer they could gain actually saved the department $15,000.
None of the committee members had any questions on that, and the various Police Department reports came to an end.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=965304&GUID=6940F780-7745-4922-B66A-CD5C997B88D9
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