Accomplishment #3
We have worked hard to establish citizen trust and satisfaction.
I have an open door and accept all complaints from anyone. I have my direct line and cell phone number listed on my business cards and website. Supervisors who receive officer complaints explain that if they aren’t satisfied with the internal investigation outcome, they are encouraged to discuss the matter with me personally. I’m very proud of my record as the overwhelming majority of people who have talked to me personally, end up satisfied. One of the reasons this works is because I really do listen and frequently make changes/corrections to fix problems based on these insights. By the way, I only get a small fraction of the complaints that I used to receive, a testament to the great work our officers are doing.
We’re quick to turn over conflict-of-interest cases to other
agencies – especially critical incidents in which deadly force is used.
We raised the bar when we hired Joelyn as a Community Projects Coordinator
and stepped up our communication with the news media by providing daily
releases and research. For a police
department, we are very generous in releasing information. We also added social media (Chief’s blog,
Facebook, Twitter) as an additional outreach to the community.
I collaborated with a university professor in creating a victim
satisfaction survey. Starting out, we
had a 65% satisfaction rate – typical of many police departments. We then tied this to individual officers by
sampling two cases per month per officer.
Our satisfaction rate skyrocketed from 65% to 92% in a year’s time and
recently, we’ve been flirting with 98%.
When results are measured, results improve.
Along those same lines, we initiated data-driven performance
measures on quality resulting in a 12% increase in solve rates and higher
quality cases presented to the Prosecutor’s Office. I’m sure this also helped with the victim
satisfaction rate.