my name is al buck i'm the chief of police and today i'd like to talk about a little bit about the police department what we've accomplished in the last year and with town meeting coming up about the budget that will be presented at the town meeting day most  probably don't realize that the richmond police department is comprised of five full time officers that includes myself one of those officers is pretty much dedicated to camel's hump middle school in richmond elementary school  full time basis so in essence there's myself in three full time officers when schools in session the cover the complaints that come up in town we currently run a ten hour schedule which means we cover twenty hours a day and him were on call for the hours that were not on most of the time it's anywhere from about three o'clock in the morning to when i come on usually it by thirty or six in the morning and this last year we have handled twelve  hundred forty three cases now that's cases that a case number was planned so there documented we actually handle more calls than that but not everything gets a case the reponse to it but that was slightly up from the year before when we had twelve of that nature that runs the whole gamut of the laws that are out there this year we issued fifteen hundred twenty two written warnings actually were somebody was stopped in a study given given a traffic ticket the issued a written warning most of the time those are for things like tail lights headlights not using your turn signal things like that nature that was up good certainly from eight hundred forty two the year before we issued a total of nine hundred eighty traffic tickets which was up from six hundred thirty five these are civil violations which most people don't realize now until the mid ninety's prosecution of traffic tickets was handled by the state's attorney's office now all traffic ticket the prosecutions actually handled by the officer that issues it so when we go to court somebody can test a traffic ticket that we've issued be it for speeding red lights whatever happens to be we get a court notice we actually go to court and prosecutor on cases now it's us the defendant sometimes they have a lawyer they're not supposed to but sometimes they do we present our case they present their case and then the judge makes a decision what most people also don't realize is that if you lose that case you're not only subject to the the maximum pound they wish for a traffic offenses eleven hundred ninety seven dollars but you also are usually going to get tagged with a fifty to fifty court fee which a lot of that money goes back into victims assistance programs and things of that nature so we had a pretty busy year one of the things we're seeing more of we've had several heroin overdoses we just recently had one with an eighteen year old girl decided to double up her dose and inject both both of baggies at once luckily the the owner of the residence where she was visiting her boyfriend  and observed that she was blue not breathing they started c p r course rescue got called and they were able to revive her but we're we're seeing it was a surge of heroin overdoses not only in this county in the state but even here in the town of richmond so some of these things lead to all the crimes that we've been having the property crimes the big thing that we talked about last week time we talked on the search warrant and that's money they're trying to get money to feed their heroin addiction so it's been a pretty busy year we currently have one new officer in the cademy he's in his third week cademy is sixteen weeks and then they go through what we call the process which is a field training officer which is almost three more months so we won't see that new person on the road until late this summer not on his own anyways we do anticipate that one of our current officers that we have will be leaving he's already told me that he's probably will be gone in august or september sometime in that timeframe moving to another state to be closer to his family so it's been a fairly busy year we've had a lot more accidents this year than we seem to be last year than we normally get which we talked about briefly last time today it's out there stowing again you can't really hear the scanner in the background but they're they're already going off the road the other night our guys i think we had seven or eight slide offs the last little snowstorm we had where they just continue to drive off the road and those we don't take action reports for if there's no damage you know it's just a toll back it's it we don't do it acts and report for that but our accidents seem to be going up one of the things we're going to talk about is our budget and if you look at the budget when you get your town report the budget overall has gone up only three point two percent for the police department most of that if you look as one big line item our health insurance costs for the department of going up over forty percent would that change to the new system it's pretty pricey for for us to maintain that so one of the things i'm asking for is support on town meeting day is for the police department budget it's pretty bare bones as it is you look at the salary base line we're talking less than one percent that we've increased that's about three quarters of a percent of this department lives right now on grants that we write we questing money from federal or state agencies to help fund us currently we have grants for overtime for traffic enforcement we have grants for overtime for d w i enforcement we actually have two of those those are for overtime those are help us week either have somebody stay out later or have another officer come on that money is reimbursed to us once we pay it and we do the time sheet we send it in once a month and then the state agency that we deal with which is d p s department of public safety reimburse is for the time that the officers spent on those grants whether it be the traffic safety over time or one of the two duis overtimes we also get a lot of our equipment that we wouldn't have based on grants from we've written we're getting last year we got new radios for the cruisers the new digital what they call digital p twenty five compliant which is the federal government is mandating that everybody went to the new narrowband digital typer new narrowband radios back as of last january so we had upgrade to radios radios for the cruisers are a couple thousand dollars apiece so we did get a grant for that and that was those were paid for out of a budget funding i've also got  equipment grant we get through governors highway safety so things like the traffic best one of the things i'm looking at is osha and motion now requires these high visibility traffic safety vests which are cut sometimes or pain to put on so i'm looking at this is basically a high visibility traffic safety windbreaker is what it is and they mandate that if you're out on a long term traffic situation we're not talking routine traffic stops but i an accident scene or something directing traffic for extended period of time that you have that we give them and supply the high visibly traffic safety best now because if you don't and you get hurt  your workers comp could be affected by that the cheapest one i can find about seventy dollars a piece so i got to buy enough of those that in different sizes so they fit everybody because and not everybody is the same size  so i'll probably order in about seven of those but though that money will come out of a federal traffic safety grant and it will be reimbursed to us the money out front we have to pay the money upfront but once the check is cashed in cleared we have to do a basically a request for reimbursement and we get the money back so we have that grant we got five thousand dollars this year i just had to replace one of our radars speed radar for the cruisers believe it or not one radars two thousand and fifteen dollars that's food into twenty eight hours and shipping that's per one radar unit so we have a brand new one that will be going into service we just got it will be going there service shortly we also have a federal department of justice bulletproof and they call it will prove with their bullet resistant that's we supply our officers with bullet resist or about retail about twelve hundred dollars apiece and we just ordered one for our newest guy and he cademy because they have to have it by week nine when they're in the cademy our cost and that's just under seven hundred dollars the federal government reimburses us fifty percent and that with here again we pay the the price of the cost of it upfront and we request reimbursement through the department of justice on the bullet proof vest it's a program that's been all the big push behind it it's been going on for about twelve years now so otherwise and the thing with bulletproof vests it's not one size fits all they have to be custom fitted to each individual officer so you can't just go out and on a rock and buy you know pick out a small medium large extra large or whatever they're actually custom fitted so you get the maximum protection if you happen to get shot and it does happen this state been thirty six plus years i've been shot at a couple times luckily they haven't hit me but it does happen so i'm asking for your support on town meeting day and the other question i want the people to think about in the future and i won't be here long enough to see it because it takes forever it is a public safety building and i know in the past you've seen our or holding cell but this town center where we are is not conducive to what we do  law enforcement there was no secure really good place to process our processing room holding cell is not conducive to safety both for the suspects in the individual officers that are actually trying to process somebody there it's too small there's too many jagged corners it's just you know we're trying to make a holding cell with a sink in the toilet and over a bunk plus our processing which is you know fingerprints photographs dui all in that tiny little space and if we actually have more than one person we don't have any place to put them or if we have a female we'll have a separate place to put females we do occasionally do a females for crimes that are committed in this town so in the future i think the town needs to start looking at and i've talked to this about would dislike board in the past and the town managers they really need to think about a public safety building and i'm talking something that's both police and fire the fire department was built in i think the very early seventy's it's old it's small it's cramped it's fallen down and the biggest problem it has a lot of times they can't get the fire trucks back into it because of the steepness of the property it's on without town highway coming out and standing and salting and plowing they just can't get the fire trucks back up into it and that becomes an issue especially when you're doing cold weather and water and things of that nature so i will be at town meeting day i'm there i'll be there this will be my third one i'm there to hansard questions and the town report you'll see a report by me you can pick them up they're not being mailed out anymore you should've got a postcard from the town clerk they have cases of i'm here to it's all gets down to trying to save some money is the postage you can pick one up there usually down in the lobby or over in linda's office at the town clerk's office and i'm sure they'll have a bunch of them at town meeting day at the when we meet that day and that booklet is the reports from the partment heads and everything that we talked about today and more will be in their my report which is written in their talks about some cases that we dealt with in the last twelve months in our overall statistics and things of that nature but of course it's limited in space so we don't talk about everything there's another thing i'd like to bring up on while we're talking about the budget as most people realize that you know they say well you've got a police officer in the schools i believe in the us our old school resource officer and i prefer in the schools the elementary schools in the middle school the start so it gets the kids used to seeing a police officer it's not in a role that that's not conducive to good feelings for lack of a better word most of the time what happens when kids are involved is where they're because there's a domestic situation or there's a bad accident and that's how they see as you know they don't they see has taken dad or mom away we get called there would you see have for you know the partner child children families and you know the kids might be taken this way but to actually see is the police officer in a different li they see the officer in uniform in the schools every day dealing with any problems that they they have in the schools helps with the staff on security issues the biggest thing for schools in this state is usually  custodial issues when they a parent is not supposed to have custody tries to take a child or children they also become instructors they teach certain courses now there's going to be more of that in the school system where hopefully at least once or twice a month the s are always actually teaching a different class be it you know on bullying or cyber crimes or alcohol use tobacco use marijuana drugs all that kind of stuff the thing is though the schools contribute to that sorry between the camels and the richmond elementary school the schools reimburse the town almost the entire salary for the officer that's there for the nine months when the officer is not in school when there's no school summer vacation school breaks then that officer works the road so we get an extra person on the road which kind of helps sometimes because in some of the guys can take a day off take vacation time that most of time we don't it's hard to get because other than days when i'm working or an overlap shift there's generally only one person on duty in the town of richmond with only you know the five full time officers and one part time officer right now just keep in the cupboard one person and on any given given shift is sometimes challenging so i'm really looking for your support for town meeting day and like i said i'll be there if you have any questions feel free to ask me vector i'm the rich and fire chief the fire department this year does have an article on the town warning to replace an engine every five years we replace an engine as per the capital plan and we're in a rotation of where  we have four large trucks each truck has a twenty year life and the twenty year life divided by four is replacing an engine every five years so this year we're replacing the one nine hundred ninety five engine number two  now this engine has a twelve hundred fifty gallon per minute pump and it also has a fifteen hundred gallon tank and i said to place it with a comparable engine it may look like the engine that we had purchase five three or four years ago with the snub nose because any type of commercial cab these days won't fit in our fire station or fire station just as a long enough so the looks may be different but will be called a comparable engine and along those lines a long term plan we do have plans to start talking about a public safety building here in richmond we don't have any concrete plans at this time nor do we know exactly where we want to put it but i think we'll have to form a committee within the next two years to the room ten years from now look at a new fire police station and a public safety building whether or not the highway department would go in there would be another consideration but we do need to look at that over the long term and i want to stress that this is a long term plan at this point and nothing that we're going to be talking about it town meeting this year the town meeting will be there you can talk with me about the replacement of the truck you can talk with me about the building if you wish but again i want to stress we have no long term plans yet we just need to start discussing it and see how people feel about that