The Tempe Police Department is getting creative amidst budget cuts.
The official numbers for the crime rates in Tempe should be released soon according to Tempe Police Chief Tom Ryff‘s most recent opinion piece in the Tempe Republic and the good news is that overall crime continued to decline in spite of budget cuts experienced in 2010.
Tempe Police Chief Tom Ryff: “Doing More With Less”
How did the Tempe Police Department manage to do a better job fighting crime with less resources in 2010?
According to Chief Tom Ryff, a deep commitment to protect and serve by the entire department was at the core of it.
“Significant and unavoidable budget cuts resulted in layoffs for some, increased workload for others, and a commitment from everyone to do whatever was necessary to protect those to which we took an oath.”
But it isn’t just this deep-rooted department-wide commitment that resulted in lower crime numbers, it was also a focus on technology and community building that helped. According to Chief Ryff:
“I have placed an emphasis on developing law-enforcement and community partnerships, procuring technology, hiring, retaining and promoting the best and brightest employees, and empowering the department’s police leaders by encouraging them to develop new and innovative strategies to fight crime.”
Just a few of the new innovative ways that the Tempe Police Department is fighting crime mentioned by Chief Ryff include:
“The deployment of two Patrol ACTION Teams which target identified crime trends in Tempe neighborhoods and use a variety of uniformed and non-uniformed enforcement methods to eradicate those trends”
and perhaps one of the bigger things accomplished by the Tempe Police Department in recent years was also given credit by Chief Ryff:
“The creation of the Crime and Intel Center, which increases the organization’s tactical crime analysis and intelligence capabilities and allows the organization to focus on analyzing and predicting crime, and taking criminals off the street before they offend again.”
Chief Ryff goes on to mention other things that the Tempe Police Department is doing to fight crime and make Tempe a safer place for everyone – and we will keep everyone updated when the 2010 crime numbers are reported.
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