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Winslow Police Chief, Dan Brown presented his quarterly report to the Winslow City Council last week.
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Brown spoke about statistics and improvements for the period between November of 2010 and January of 2019. “First off, I want to highlight that we have had a 202 percent increase in jail bookings in the year from January, 2018 to January, 2019. However, our violent crimes are down. One thing that hasn’t gone down substantially is our thefts and property crimes. A lot of the reason for that is that we are spending a long time with our violent crimes. We are still going to a lot of fight calls, for example. When we are constantly responding to these in progress crimes, it becomes life over property so some of those things don’t get enough attention as we would like. How do we fix that? By staffing, we need to increase staffing.
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“Total calls to our police department were 10,357 calls in the last three months. Of those, 1,795 were 911 calls. We dispatch for police, fire and emergency medical services (EMS). We had 67 fire calls, 742 EMS calls and 3,200 police calls. The police department took 303 written reports; affected 243 arrests; issued 65 citations; and issued 68 warnings.”
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Staffing issues have been a problem for the Winslow Police Department for some time, according to Brown. “We are working on filling staffing needs. We have one recruit at the police academy in Taylor now. We have one lateral officer slated to join us once his Arizona Post requirements are met. We are blessed to have some lateral officers that have some experience under their belts. We get a lot of lateral requests but some of them have baggage, and we are not going to take on baggage. I would rather send a brand-new recruit to the academy and invest there than bring on problems.”
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Brown has recently hired three part-time police aides as well. “They have done a wonderful job and this has been a tremendous cost savings to us. I extended the warrant boundary line to 75 miles from the City of Winslow. What used to happen, is people would literally be standing on the other side of the county line and not be able to be brought in. We are putting a stop to that. If you are going to come here and steal or commit crimes, you are going to pay. That is part of what our transport officers, or police aides, are doing. We will go to Flagstaff and pick these people up now.”
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The aides also work on court documents, written reports and other tasks provided by Chief Brown. They make transport trips to the Navajo County Jail in Holbrook as well, “This allows our officers to stay on the street.”
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Finally, Brown said, “We still take quite a few calls concerning edged weapons. I want to let you know that we have a very well trained police force. I know that there is rhetoric from past events, but I can tell you that I have never seen a police force that deals with so many people that are threatening them with knives and axes and other edged weapons. They are able to de-escalate these situations and we do have quite a few taser deployments. I will take it. I will take taser deployments because it means we are not having shootings like we could have or that other jurisdictions have. That comes down to training and the ability to make rational choices in those situations.”
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