Police Commission Minutes 08/01/2007

A. Accreditation Update – Montreal Conference. Lt. Toussaint noted the attendance at the National CALEA conference in Montreal. He found the conference useful, attending classes on new accreditation manager, information on the CASE software we purchased and information on preparing for an on site assessment.

The current status of our program is that several of the policies are being revamped and updated. We are about half way through that process. The target date is to be completed with that process by the end of August, and then move on to the proofs stage.

Capt. Dumas added that several of the updated policies have been forwarded to the Commission for review. Commanders have reviewed them. Most of the data hasn’t changed, just the format. We will be looking for feedback from the Commission in the coming weeks on this.

Comm. Flanagan commented that he found the conference in Montreal very informative and was glad he attended. He said, “I attended a number of classes. I had an opportunity to speak to Chief’s of Police, Sheriff’s and Commissioners from the CALEA association. The resounding message was that it doesn’t get any better than being CALEA accredited. It’s the finest in the United States. It holds Departments to a higher standard, officers to a higher standard and is beneficial in terms of liability for Department’s, particularly in litigation. I can’t get over how enthused I was and how much I learned.”

Chief Dubois offered that those comments summed up the conference well. He said, “I have supported the process for some time and this just reinforced what I already felt was the right thing to do. It will help us in the process as we move forward. “

B. FY 07 Goals and Objectives; 4th Quarter Report: First Draft. Chief Dubois noted that this is a summary and self-assessment of how we did with the goals we set a year ago. We had two broad goals of building relationships internally and externally and a second broad goal of enhancing preventive proactive policing with community involvement.

Chief Dubois said we did very well. There were a number of objectives entered with each broad goal and we did well with a majority of them. Of those we still need to work on, we have carried those forward to the FY 08 year. I’m pleased with our efforts. The commanders and staff made remarkable progress with the goals that we drafted. We will incorporate this document into our annual report that we submit to the City.

Comm. Dumont noted that a person called him regarding an accident where it took a cruiser 1.5 hours to respond. He said I inquired if she told the dispatcher that she was handicapped and she indicated that she did not. He said it would seem that we could ask questions like that. If a person gets in an accident they are often nervous and don’t know what kind of information to provide. It seems if she had been asked it might have changed the category of the call.

Supervisor Swats said that we do ask some specific questions because we dispatch for EMS as well as Fire. We do ask about injuries, liquids from the vehicle, if the airbags have deployed and if they are in the travel lane. If they are alongside the road, and safe [not injured] then unfortunately that may knock the call down to a lower priority.

However, probative questions such as being disabled we would not ask that. For us to probe such status would not be appropriate and would be dangerous territory. Would the person be given a false sense of special treatment if we asked those questions? We might not ever know this information unless it was volunteered.

Comm. Dumont noted the woman was very nice about the whole thing. She said the dispatcher and the officer were very nice. She never volunteered that she was handicapped. But it seems that we could ask those deeper questions. I’m not sure how to handle that.

Chief Dubois said that an hour and a half to wait for an accident is an extensive time for anyone. People are nervous when they call and expect a faster response. We have checks in place to alert supervisors after a specific amount of time for any call for service, regardless of the issue. Supervision can take another look.

Dispatch is a busy place. There are a lot of calls and activity going on. It is business oriented to a certain extent. This checks and balances allow supervision to look at a situation again. Maybe that’s an area that we could look at to ensure we did another review and made an assessment of that call against other priorities of the day.

As you know, the City Council authorized the addition of two new police officers this year. We are doing a lot of work through patrol services to provide better and faster service for low priority calls, particularly lobby calls. One of the things we can do is ensure we do the supervisory review of anything waiting over a certain period of time.

A. Twenty-Year Service Plaque: Capt. Paul Callaghan. Chief Dubois noted that Paul’s family had a prior commitment that prevented them from attending, but, anytime we do such presentations we like to note the importance of family, particularly for officers who have given twenty years of service.

Chief said we haven’t done one of these for about a year now, as it is not common for folks to stay in the profession for 20 years. Out of all that we’ve done, this one is a bit different, as Paul grew up in this City. He was born in the City, educated at Spaulding High, has a long family history with the City, and when we can get public service out of someone like that it’s always special.

Chief Dubois said Paul has come up through the ranks, starting as a patrolman. He has worked in all areas of the Department and has risen to the level of division commander with the Department in this 20-year time span. There is a lot of history here.

Capt. Dumas commented that Lt. Fricano has moved on as a result of career development and improvement. He was appreciative of the time that he spent in Rochester and for the opportunities the Commission and the Chief had given him. He really worked hard in the short time that he was here, organizing that office and it will be difficult to replace him.

C. Annual Report 2006-2007: First Draft. Chief Dubois advised this is the report that he just briefed the Commission on talking about the FY 07 goals. Its a public document and will become part of the City’s annual report. It outlines the activities of the Department throughout that time period. Large portions of the report talk about our goals and objectives for the year. Some of those accomplishments that we made are worth discussing here.

The RUN (Rochester United Neighborhoods) program increasing community interaction stepped off this year. We added sworn personnel with Council and Commission approval during this time period. The Communications Center was upgraded with better technology and we added a state of the art medical component. We worked on the accreditation goals.

We expanded our tactical and accident teams uniting with other Departments and County teams for information sharing and better cooperation of law enforcement. We updated our AED’s, completed AFIS and Reverse 911 upgrades.

Comm. Dumont commented that the City of Dover is getting Reverse 911. Chief Dubois confirmed and noted Dover has worked closely with our Communications Supervisor in this regard on logistics in implementing the system. We are working with them to further enhance our system so that we can share phone lines with them.

Supervisor Swats indicated that Rochester has ten phone lines. This limits us in the number of calls we can make at one time. If we have something going on, and Dover does not, we can manipulate the system, grab their phone lines and permit us to contact a greater number of people in a shorter period of time.

Comm. Dumont inquired if we can call both Rochester and Dover residents this way? Martha advised she would be calling only Rochester residents, but even faster, by seizing Dover phone lines to do so. She advised that she could only call Dover residents if they were programmed into her system. The same would work for Dover. Both communities will benefit.

Chief Dubois said we have done some phenomenal work this year in regional sharing. The communications center is but one example. The county teams, the regional detective units are all working closely together on crime trends that cross jurisdictional boundaries.

D. FY08 Goals and Objectives. Dep. Chief Allen said that a Goals setting session was held just this week. We approached this similar to what we did last year. We convened a good cross section of the Department to include support staff, detectives, line officers, line supervisors, commanders and even volunteers. We had several members of the business community take part as well.

This was essentially a brainstorming session approach to see what we’d like to accomplish this fiscal year. We want to publicly thank all that participated, but offer particular thanks to the members of the business community who gave so willingly of their time to assist us in this mission. The business members included Carol Hayes from Channel Business Development, Brian Hughes from HRCU, and Rich Hilow from Edward Jones Financial Services.

Dep. Chief Allen said the document before the Commission is a draft because we wanted to give the Commission the opportunity to review it and provide feedback. We believe we came up with a good, aggressive list as we did last year. Some are carried forward from last year. A lot of them are new.

There are several objectives listed under each goal to be met. We’d like to get this established and out to the members and the community. One thing that came up during the session is that we don’t do as good a job as we potentially can in marketing what services the department provides, what we really do and the process we go through to come up with the things we accomplish throughout the year. We want to finalize this and get it out to the media, on the web and to the community.

In the Lafayette Street area we have completed 98 directed patrols. In May there were eight vandalism and two aggravated assaults reported in that area. In the month of June, one vandalism and no aggravated assaults. We made three major arrests in this area. One led to a person breaking into cars and homes at night. Another was stealing cars and stealing from cars. The field interview checks are helpful and information gathered assisted ISB in a sexual assault investigation. Credit must be given to the 4 – 12 and midnight to 8 AM sergeants for their efforts in this.

Sgt. Bossi is working closely with volunteer Kelli Brochu and heading up a crime prevention component for businesses, doing target hardening, internal and external security suggestions, and any help that we can offer them. This is becoming important as retail establishments expand on Route 11 and now Route 202. We want to be ahead of the curve on this issue and stop it from happening. Businesses interested in this service can contact Ms. Brochu by phone or email and an officer will be assigned.

Volunteer Kelli Brochu, has controlled access to our system and may be able to assist us with answering some of the low priority calls we talked about. One of the goals in patrol is to improve the response time to low priority calls.

DWI saw a decrease since the beginning of the year. But during the months of May and June we made 42 such arrests, which is an increase over the same period last year. Motor vehicle activity is down significantly during those two months. We anticipate an increase in the month of July. The solid numbers are not yet available.

Officers Pinkham and O’Connor have left the field-training program and are on solo patrol. That leaves two officers still in field training. We anticipate them being out on solo patrol by the Fair. That brings us to full status.

2. Support Division: Capt. Scott Dumas. Capt. Dumas noted that the major issue for support is to find a replacement for Lt. Fricano and to set up a plan to handle the over lap of his leaving before his replacement is selected. “I want to reiterate what a great job Joe did while he was here, especially in organizing the office, which had been an issue. We used some of that as criteria during the interview process.”

The extended School Resource Officer Program with the Recreation Department over the summer has already paid off. Both the Middle and High School SRO’s continue to form relationships with the kids in our community. Kids grow up and these are the ones you want to establish relationships with, early on. Officer’s Blair and Funk have done a tremendous job. Tuesdays is officially known as “Police Day,” at camp. Different officers come to the camp and talking about aspects of the job. When time permits officers were spending parts of other days at the camps interacting with the kids. Officers Funk and Blair describe the kids’ reactions as these officers were like rock stars. The kids swarmed them, hugged them and talked with them. These are the results we were looking for, with dividends down the road.

Art Jacobs at the Recreation Department and both officers are to be commended for initiating and working with the program. Officers have signed up and had such positive interaction they’ve volunteered for additional days.

Last issue is the regional detective meetings. The more we can regionalize, the better. We are constantly seeing new ways of assisting the SWAT and TAR teams with ideas that involve multiple resources, which puts fewer burdens on the taxpayers of all the communities.

3. Communications. Supervisor Swats advised that the tactical dispatch team has responded out to its third structure fire. All has gone well and the fire department is pleased. We are going to work with the SWAT Team and the combine our resources with the Dover dispatch tactical team.

We had a mutual aid EMS call for Lebanon, Maine that we did a great job with, in locating mutual aid response, coordinating med flight and locating an injured child’s parent. Dispatcher Neal is to be commended for his work on that call.

4. Executive Report: Deputy Chief Mike Allen noted that we have begun the process of putting the new supervisor vehicle out to bid. We don’t have an update on when Code Enforcement will receive their new vehicles, allowing them to transfer their current cars over to us. We are having to dump some money into a couple of our back line cars to keep them road worthy, so hopefully the transfer will be done soon.

Dep. Chief Allen commended our crime analyst Jade Lambert. He noted she has brought this position to a new level by attending formal training, which is demonstrated in the comp stat program as well as the weekly bulletins. She is in the process of developing a community bulletin that will be distributed to the ward based groups to let them know what is happening in their wards. This may include criminal activity, quality of life issues or other important information. This will be developed further in the weeks and months ahead.

Chief Dubois commented that crime analyzing is another area we are working in cooperation with others. Jade has teamed up with others in the area and is exchanging information that is beneficial to multiple jurisdictions.

1. Host City for USS Memphis. Capt. Dumas advised the Commission he attended a ceremony with Mayor Larochelle at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard for the USS Memphis, which is docked for refurbishing. Rochester is the host City for the boat, which is anticipated to be in dock until April of 2008. He noted that we may see a lot of Navy personnel in the community. As a host city, we get the benefits of their services and manpower. If you know of any projects that need doing, and need manpower, we can be in touch with the commanders of the boat and work on those issues.

A. Appreciation and Recognition: Comm. Flanagan noted that it’s always a pleasure to commend our personnel, and it’s nice to see the public recognizes them too. Persons recognized during the previous month included: Attorney Tom Velardi recognizes Det. Chris Mangum and Det. Eric Ball for court testimony. Attorney Velardi noted that he wished the testimony was recorded, as it would be a useful training tool. Off. Matthew Flathers is recognized for outstanding work on a traffic stop that yielded the recovery of stolen property and charges brought against a suspect for misdemeanor and felony crimes. [Noted that Off. Flathers has been with the Department slightly longer than 1 year.] Off. Ms. Grenier thanks Off. Michael Miehle for his compassionate and caring handling of a sensitive juvenile matter. Off. Brenden Bentz is recognized for persistence in investigating a report of attempted alcohol purchases, wherein the vehicle was located and several underage persons were detained. Det. Sgt. Triano is thanked by the NH Police Cadet Academy for instructing a course on Internal Affairs.

Our salaries line was overspent by almost twenty thousand dollars. That seems negative, but when you think of the attrition numbers that are factored in, it’s an indicator that our turnover this past year was significantly reduced. We are over because of attrition that didn’t happen.

Comm. Dumont commented that revenue was down almost thirty percent. Chief Dubois said he noticed that and feels the numbers may have been over projected. Deputy Chief Allen added those numbers are based and projected by the previous budget and thus its hard to pinpoint to an exact figure.

Comm. Dumont MOVED to enter a non-public session at 7:51 P.M. for the purpose of personnel and legal matters. SECOND by Comm. Flanagan. The motion PASSED by roll call vote, Comm. Dumont-yes, Comm. Flanagan-yes. The non-public session closed at 8:31 P.M. on a MOTION by Comm. Dumont, SECOND by Comm. Flanagan and PASSED 2 – 0.