and we hope to have a great tour through the department with all the things that happened behind the scenes that we are mostly not aware of but are making our community really safe so captain baxter what you think we should look at today well we're really glad you're here because you know it's not rebirth that you get a look on the inside of the department and up close look at different aspects of the department so we're really excited about the opportunity to showcase to an extent but also talk about some difficult things like  want to show you how important traffic safety is to the community and and everyone has a story of someone speeding down the road and you know what's being done about it and what does the department of public safety do  those situations we also want to talk show you a little bit about the detective bureau of our major case investigations and so you know when a case gets brought forward from an office or what if it's a major case or a bigger deal there's a there's a get special attention and that detective bureau aspect is what we have here as well and then you know any time you go the department you know you encounter someone and we have cadets that are college students that are part time employees here so we're going to you know introduce you to one of our cadets and tell you a little bit about what it's like to you know start in law enforcement start through that schooling process and the opportunities we have here at the department and then we also want to talk about training training is a very important aspect of public safety in law enforcement and so captain bers is going to talk to you both that as well and then we also want to want to introduce you to the chief and make sure that everyone knows who the chief is and he's got a very important job overseeing both police and fire services so it's a high stress job he's got a lot of it on his plate but we don't want you or everyone to be introduced to him as well right not to mention henry oh that's right you know we also have that plan for you so that will be great i said well it's great to have you here today and we hope to have a great tour at the tallinn department of public safety  we are here in the public safety garage with joe flank who is one of our officers a very special officer who has a helper here with a lot of fur i do his name is  henry great and you are what they call a canine officer well what does that involve a canine officer involves have a regular patrol duties but i'm assigned to a dog and this is the dog that i'm a so i go to a canine related call supples and i help out drug investigations tracking wanted people are missing people assistant schools smells for narcotics he's called a dual purpose dog so he is trained in their contacts detection tracking obedience and aggression he is certified in a number of different narcotics as cocaine crack cocaine heroin ecstasy marijuana and we've found all those drugs here in holland well it's a great thing to have a dog like that how long have you been working with i've had him for four years he is six years old so he stays with you all the time or you pick him up at that apartment or house at work he stays with me right at my house ok so it's part of my family wow i mean he is a and vehicles and houses and he can track people that run from the police or wander away from you know of a school or a nursing home or anything like that people can sometimes be more scared of the enforcement a dog even than people correct can be just used as a deterrent and deterrent yeah can you show us how he finds something absolutely absolutely that would be really interesting sure see that that's great do you have any stories of how he has helped you in in maybe tracking or finding thing you know yes we recently just are not on a suspicious package the post office and they suspected that there was possibly some narcotics coming in from another state and so we used the dog to run through a bunch of boxes and he located the suspicious box and during the investigation they open the box and sewn inside two stuffed animals were two ounces of crystal meth walsh is a very high value drug so instead of very friendly yeah great so how about tracking people have you ever had to do that yup we recently were called to help another officer in our probation parole department where a subject was going to go back to prison for a crime and fled from the police in the area of sixteenth and river in the during the daytime and he ran about a block and then broke into an empty house and i was hiding in there so we used henry to track him and we were able to track him through the neighborhood and through backyards and right to the back door of the house and we were able to see the subject wow in the residence that was going to try to run again but didn't because the dog was present yeah so he was a deterrent to running and also saved a lot of people in the meantime possibly yes and yeah a lot of time and a loss of everything so wow so he is so you're so worth your weight in gold yeah we're so glad to have henry and  that you are willing to take on the responsibility of a dog for twenty four seven you really responsible for him all the time and staying with him so we so appreciate your willingness to to serve in that way and to help all of us feel safer and i think everybody really feels better knowing that there's a canine division to the police force because people are good but there are sometimes dogs can do things better no thank you yeah appropriate you've taken that time with us to  well here we are in the basement of the department of public safety building and this looks like a shooting training area yeah shooting range i'm not much with guns you can tell but anyway so what do you do down here this is where the officers qualify on the firearms and years ago we said it outdoors in then the old building had a very small shooting range in it when we built this one we made it much bigger and also made it possible to bring a cruiser in so we could do scenario based trainings for the officers to be involved in as they're doing the firearms during the state of michigan has the minimum qualifications that we have to do for firearms training they're very minimal so we go beyond that to make sure that we're returning our officers properly so they have periodic testing on how well they can use a firearm they have to pass quarterly a course to be able to carry wow that's good that's good security to know that everybody's up to snuff and holding a way yeah that's really important well you know people get into all kinds of situations they have don't mess to problems they've got issues with their children perhaps maybe they have neighborhood problems and everything's out of control so they call nine one one they call the police and now you guys go there you hear a report of whatever that citizen call them but you really don't know what you're driving into when you come to a situation you really don't know how many layers there are to that problem or how many people are involved there what you're going to face how do you get ready for that well for the basic overall training for the police officer it's starts in the police academy and there they get i guess sort of a foundation of some of those skills that they need to be a street cop yeah but once we hire a new candidate on is a new police officer to us he's not a police officer yet he holds a state certification he's jump through the hoops for that but we don't call him a police officer yet not to we've trained him we have a four month field training program where the officers will over the course of that four months they start at the beginning where they're with the training officer and they're observing the training officer is doing most of the work taking the reports and they can see how it's going to be done and as that four months continues slowly on the probationer of the new officer is taking on at first some of the smaller simple tasks and as it goes on more and more of them until at the very end of that four months the probation or the new officer will be doing all of the work in fact at the very end the training officers in soft calls or in street clothes just observing that this officer can handle himself and take these calls but even in that you're never going to encounter everything and that training process and it gives again a really good based to start from but as an officer progresses through their career laws change case law changes things and we have to stay current on all that so we have in ongoing training that we have to say there's plenty of court decisions that  make it very clear the requirements to continue to train for police officers and so we do a lot of in house training on a monthly basis the officers will do in house and that's about sixty hours per year that each officer does in about forty five that ours is in topics such as firearms tazers control to x defensive tactics the types of hands on for situations the rest of it is going to be legal updates blood borne pathogens hazardous materials law updates legal updates in addition we're members of the west michigan law enforcement consortium which is it's up and down the lake shore many many law enforcement agencies in western michigan are part of it every agency's pool is a small amount into the consortium in the consortium is able to bring in a lot of very valuable training that each agency on its own would never be able to do now you've got to be responsible for anything that could go wrong right and so we were regularly identifying you know what off circuit they haven't been to this training in a while let's send in for a refresher or something new comes out of there's a change in the law then we'll dept and train accordingly because a lot of times these are kind of high stress situations of like a half a second to make a decision and those decisions involve sometimes firearms or somebody else has a firearm where you really it's not just about the skills that you develop with equipment and machinery it's a lot about people and how they operate how they think or how they don't think and what they do when they're in a group or whatever but you've got to anticipate it's true we spend a lot of time training on like i just mentioned the firearms control tactics they use of force situations and sometimes we get question a lot you spend so much time training on this and you're not a military organization your police organization and i understand where they're coming from but i think to understand our mentality if we had done a fly those tasks that we do and i think a lot of industries prior to this isn't unique to police work you have tasks that are low risk and for us that means limited probability of anybody getting hurt anybody getting killed or severely injured a low probability of the lawsuits or damaging ongoing criminal investigation there just isn't a great chance for those but then we also have those high risk situations where ok now all those things are a real reality good probability that somebody could get hurt or killed or the department gets sued or the city gets sued or we damage an ongoing you know whatever the case is so those are the high risk ones but then you break that down even further and you say well which ones of these are the low frequency events in other words i don't happen very often yeah and if you look and if you talk to anybody who's a risk manager those are the kind of situations that are going to keep them up at night a high risk low frequency because even the high risk ones that are high frequency mean we do i'm all the time yeah there's still that risk but you've done it many times you've got that muscle memory and that that experience that you can draw and say wow this happens or this happens i know exactly how to respond i know how to do it but when it's the situation that officers never encountered in their career and sometimes it's the first time the departments encountered it in years if ever or something that you know it only happens once every ten or twenty years but it's high risk that's not the time to say well hold on a second i got to check the book you know i want to talk to my supervisor and find out how i'm going to do this or need to brush up on what the case law is or statutory law what am i allowed to do i mean like you said earlier that's when the split second decisions have to be made and you have to make the right decisions because those are also the situations that involve people who think they can go  for a lot of our training is geared towards those high risk low frequency events not because we think going to happen all the time but it's because they don't happen all the time right that we've got to train to him so what you do you you take a situation you put the officer in it and then you do it again and then again to try to make it more high frequency through the training so that should it ever happened now we know how to properly respond to it you kind of do scary situation training we called scenario based training so that's part of the reason why we have the cruisers in here like i said so we can do traffic stops in areas or we've already built you know mock houses or buildings or alleyways in here so that the officers now can encounter something and how are you going to respond to it because obviously doing it in a scenario i'm going to remember that a whole lot more than an instructor standing from a classroom and telling me yeah right it's going i've done it i know how to do this not i got to try to remember what somebody told me to do we also do training with  for example we call them bag drills which basically take like a bag or a blanket you throw it over the officers had it and then when the scenario is ready the instructor takes it off and they're presented with a threat it could be somebody with a knife somebody with a close fist somebody with a baseball bat or somebody you know who's holding it but not threatening the officer just standing there with it know what is the proper response or we've done them to where it's just continued reaction to where they go from one station to where here's a threat deal with it you move to the next station here's the threat deal with it you move to the next station here's a threat deal with it get to the back line you do it again and again because what you're doing is you're putting that stimulus out there i see somebody with a knife h ming in response to training the brain to go the stimulus this is the correct response somebody is holding it down their side different stimulus this is how to respond to that so just building that muscle memory training the brain so that olguin lot of these are situations that you know what offers hope never happen but if it does now i'm prepared and i can deal with it legal i mean as a department we want to make sure it's dealt with legally that it's defensible in the same time obviously these are high risk situations but if there's any way we can minimize the risk to the officers to any witnesses around to the suspect themselves that's our goal is to try to do it as safely as possible in a situation that many times is very unsafe yeah yeah well there was that story of in the nine eleven situation where one office manager trained his whole office about how if there's a problem we go down these steps and they would train i don't know what it was every like every month and everybody mock about brother there goes that whole office full of their little deal again and but when they actually got hit that hard tire office staff survived and they just went into automatic and like you said that muscle memory and did exactly what they had trained to do no matter what was going on around them and they were all say and that is our hope right with the level of training that you guys have to do on top of all your hours of regular work right because it brought up a good point it is the stress of those situations because even the officers going into even those you know fully trained police officer it's still stressful for me to go into some of these situations and you're going to rely on your training and whether that's what's going to fall back on to and if you've never had the training now you have nothing to fall back on to write in that's not the time to try to figure out you know right you don't have the time right now so yeah this is so informative and we really appreciate seeing the back side of all that training and all that you guys do for that  ok great and we'd also like to talk about traffic and how to deal with maybe winter conditions in that well what would you have to tell us about controlling traffic and all of that and holland well obviously from a police perspective our big concern is to get motorists to operate safely and do it in a way that traffic still moves but prevent the accidents and it's a responsibility that we take very seriously all the officers who work for the department are expected as part of their normal duties to assist and actively enforce traffic violations that they may see issue citations take crash reports or though most of the officers especially as our staffing levels have decreased don't have a lot of time to do that so we have and we have for many years we have four officers that are assigned specifically as traffic enforcement officers and their primary responsibilities when they're out on the road is handling the crashes that come in when they're available and of the traffic cars on an available doesn't matter where in the city the crash is that's the car that will respond to police that crash only if the traffic is not available that one of the troll officers will then respond to take that crash and since these are the guys that also are taking all the crashes and seen the end result of it in knowing how many are going on they are also the ones in part of their responsibilities is to do the traffic enforcement to be out there trying to find  violators issue the citations give the warnings whatever the case may be and our focus is not we're not looking at writing more tickets we're not looking at getting more fines it's to try to change driver behavior to g people to operate safely in the first place similar to the seat belts if somebody has their seat belt on because they recognize that it's safer and you can look at the research from from the officer who was safety planning from any of the insurance institute it is obviously statistically a lot safer where your seatbelt in people don't for that reason great but if they were because they want to get a ticket that's great we don't care what the reason is just so that they wear their seatbelts same with operating a vehicle safely going at safe speeds we want them to operate in a fashion and in a manner that hopefully will prevent collisions from occurring in the first place or if they do minimize the damage or the risk of injury to those involved yeah we always think the accidents going to happen to somebody out send i'm just this is the end i need to get to the next place so too bad for you i need to break the speed limit but we need to realize that we have those laws for a reason and we're trying to keep everybody safe and reasonable in this whole process and but i'm sure  have accidents that happen and it is you think over the different locations for accidents that well would be like the tap places that people have accidents in holland well as you might expect the most common location where crashes occur those places where we have what we would consider a traffic conflict where the potential for vehicles coming across each other's paths passing each other or having to stop for each other intersections is where a lot of this is going to happen and also as might also be expected the greater the volume of traffic that goes through a particular intersection in a given day the greater likelihood that we see crashes and those intersections that have large volumes of traffic historically every year those are our top crash intersections every year we monitor and we keep track of which ones are the top intersections last year sixteenth in waverley was a top crash intersection with thirty nine crashes over the course of the year and it looks like again this year just based on the numbers at this point that's probably going to come in as a top crash intersection possibly a little bit higher than last year if the numbers hold true from what we're looking at the other top ones that we see thirty second washington forty eighth and washington thirty second us thirty one nineteen river seventh and river kind of the ones you might expect with live ice coming together high volume and that's what we're seeing the problem is that often like a quote unquote rush hour when people are trying to get to school and work and coming home from that or is it just kind of sprinkled throughout the whole day and night you know it was sprinkled throughout the whole day and night but we certainly see peaks at certain times of the day biggest peak of the day or i should say the first pick of the day when it initially starts is usually run seven thirty eight o'clock in the morning will see a spike at that time frame for i guess sort of the morning rush and to work in then but eleven thirty to around one two o'clock in the afternoon we see another spike and then after four o'clock and that can go till six thirty seven people are in a hurry to get to work now how to lunch hours every now turn or want to get home and yes speed certainly does play a factor even within the intersections yeah so when you see those crashes happen it really you realize that having  really save lives and property and all of that what would you say are your biggest violations for tickets that people have to get written well if you're talking specifically related to accidents where were citing a motorist for being at fault for the accident the grade is in it this is across all the different intersections the most common violation we see is what's called failing to stop within the assured clear distance ahead which is the statutory term which means you rear ended somebody ok and you know if you did there i review a lot of the reports and reading what the drivers told the officer and what led up to the crash and a lot of times it's there to close the vehicle in front of them and coming up to or somebody's going to make a right hand turn somebody is behind him but there's a pedestrian in the walkway that has the right away to be there and again we get the rear end collision in the other big factor that plays into it is drivers getting distracted whether it be looking down at the radio happening to look out the window having a conversation with a passenger or something and they look away only for a second or two and they look up and cars are stopped in front of them in something that maybe we don't intuitively guess who would know this but people don't always think it through is that even a thirty five miles an hour which isn't very fast you're still travelling at fifty feet per second almost just shy of that you bump it up to fifty miles an hour now you're traveling almost seventy five feet per second so if you look away just for a second and you're traveling fifty miles an hour when you bring your eyes back your vehicle just travels fifty feet and you know how much distance are you giving yourself in front of that vehicle in front of you so it's very important to keep that distance plus when you're in these high traffic areas make sure that you're not allowing those distractions to take your eye off the road get keep your eye faced and from e s l you something happens because it's always the unexpected and something happens you weren't expecting it to happen now traffic stopped and your rear end and like i said michigan statutes very clear you're in the car in front of you you're at fault for the collision it's almost impossible to not i mean it is but it's very rare that that could happen it would take the right set of circumstances for the basically you're in the car in front of you you're at fault for the accident and chances are you'll get cited for it yeah wow and it's not just looking around and looking down distraction has kind of a capital d now with all the other little to devices we can have that and even sleep people besides people that had too much to drink we're awful have texting people and emailing people and newspaper reading people and there probably are some make up people who have thought yeah a lot of things that we can think i'll just do a little something on the way to somewhere and i'll get two things done at the same time and write and the problem is when like i said something happens now you weren't expecting in front of you is word that multitasking while you're driving can become problematic and obvious i mean you alluded to the texting and driving obviously there's been a lot of information out there recently about how dangerous that is the recent change in the law outlawing it obviously is something that we strongly discourage in you know for parents tell your kids and for parents yourself wait till you get to your destination if it's that critical pull over to a safe location you know risk read the t respond to something that has to be responded to but don't do it while you're driving just a little half second looking down is you're traveling a bunch of feet in the oh yeah and can end up with a really serious situation yes yes so would that be their most common violations them that you see if it's not an interstate like intersection crash related just pulling people over is that like mostly speeding or certainly the greatest volume of just in foresman action for citations written is speed and red light violations or a good shoots to the traffic control also a stop sign violations or somebody is either you know pushing the light gone through after a couple seconds or you know coming to close doubt but not quite at a stop sign continuing on and we just know from our experience that you certainly have even a slow speeds you've got a blind spot with you called me or a pillers that's right up here and when you're sitting in the driver's seat and you look and a vehicle can be coming in you just don't see it until you come to that full and complete stop if a vehicle is position just right when you come to a stop all this and you'll see it but if your role that and i can't say how many crashes i've taken over the years and he says i stopped i never saw him or you talk to the guy in the cross trade who had the right away says he rolled it and i know exactly what happened and it was a failing to yield from the stop sign because they just i never knew that there was a blind spot in the front of the side and it's at the intersection when you're looking definitely to the driver side is worse than to the passenger side wow reasons to obey the law yes yes well that's a great now so there's a lot controlling traffic and doing things right now are kind of coming into the winter season and we may get snow i am sure we were maybe more than last year to last year was pretty mellow so who knows what we're going to have and you have like any tips for us on how to drive and what to think about when we're getting in one big thing is slow down if people you've got to get to work to school run the errands whatever if there's any time crunch leave yourself a little bit of extra time because it's just going to take longer you simply can't drive the same way when there's snow on the road as when it's dry and we see it and i talk to other people who everybody knows that oh you know first snow fall of the year and we crash crashes people sliding into each other having to really learn how to drive in the snowy conditions but the big thing is slow down take your time yeah better to get there than to have an accident on the way right away yeah i can imagine even in michigan we think we know or do on because we've driven snow and but still it was a learning curve again and every year yeah hopefully we learn it faster than people that like in tennessee where everything dies and quits with half an inch of snow and so we are learning somewhat but it's good to have reminders and good to slow down and appreciate what you guys are doing and helping us i can't imagine how miserable that day must be being out there have been one crash after another in the freezing ice and snow and so many times we take those kind of things for granted we really appreciate your service to the community and all that you've done over the years to help us have safe streets and help us learn to be responsible drivers so thanks so so now we're in the detective bureau area of the highland public safety department and we have a talking with captain rick walters who is in charge of our detectives services investigative things that we get into right so you're the one that looks behind the scenes to why something happened and figuring out who's responsible that's correct we have a number of the tech tips that work for our department and their primary responsibility is to investigate the various crimes that come in through our patrol unit so you have to take the evidence and figure out where that takes you and obviously our initial response to any crime is a reputable unit so when someone calls nine one one they respond to the scene and when they fight figured the crime is of significance on the needs of the community so we see that car go around that says evidence technician is that a detective person the evidence technician program is actually part of the patrol unit and they capture the evidence on the scene but they were candid hand with our detectives so in effect of goes to the scene of a particular crime they were very close to where the evidence technician to make sure that we obtain all possible for the club and it's from the scene and then you have a place where you keep all that hair out all the evidence then gets taken back to the home pleased probably here we have a very fraught detectives that work a lot of the sex crimes so they work very closely with the children's assessment center here in holland which specializes in crimes involving children whether it be physical or sexual abuse so those two detectives were the back of those investigations he works very closely with a lot of the financial sector of our community works with local banks and he's also a polygraph operator which is kind of a specialized position within our department that we're very fortunate to have  we also have another detective that is a computer forensic analyst he goes across the country receiving specialized training on basically any investigation that involves technology and it's once again  it's a trend where we're seeing technology used more and more to commit different types of crime and obviously that's a unique it's very unique it's not something that most officers are trained in but it's important for us to stay on the forefront of technology and make sure that we capture the evidence that we need in those cases as well yet that's changing all the time it's changing over time and it's not uncommon for us to have a victim of a fraud here in the city of holland that we investigate we discover that the suspect may be another continent and then of course it's very difficult we can't go there to interview them and a lot of those cases we end up turning over to federal authorities but it's still important for us to investigate those to provide some sense information to the victim and then also be proactive with getting information to make sure that they're not victimized in the future yeah kind of how people with how they have to be careful around their computers definitely because they are used in a lot of different ways there's a lot of fraudulent there and that's what our computer forensic analyst can do is try to recover whatever he can from a computer or phone or whatever it may be yeah steve you also have a drug investigation group that works with other unit which pretty much focuses on the gang gangs in the holland area and then we have another detective that focuses more on the drug side in the greater outer county area so many problems and problem behavior comes from an addiction and that abuse is a huge section of the community that we as a police department deal with it's reality we certainly wish it wasn't that way but yet it does affect people's behavior and  leads to a lot of crime yeah they're out of control and they do a lot of control things exactly because they're taking something and then that makes them more out of control because they want to support that have been exactly they do things that they won't do if it if it were not for the drug and then like you said it creates these habit forming things in life that then leads to ways to support that financially which is a lot of property crime and been a lot of the other things that we see negative social groups to support that type of industry and yeah correct so you guys are  busy we're every busy it's unfair action is to the point where every day we have different cases that come in we read every day a kind of routine is we look over all of the calls that we received in the last twenty four hours many of those calls are kind of open and shut cases but we look at those cases and say ok which ones do we need to investigate further and it's to the point where there are some that maybe merit investigation we just don't have the resources to do so we then look at that particular crime and say well what are the odds that we can solve this given the information we have do we have suspect information do we have any physical evidence and if we don't have some of those factors it's still significant to the victim but we do have to pick and choose sometimes just because we don't have unlimited resources yeah and sometimes you can put a case aside because you don't larceny if we don't have a lot of suspect information or something to go on that complaint may be closed but if we get a suspect identified two weeks later three weeks later we can always reopen that case and we do that on a regular basis yeah yeah  case like that it's time work to our advantage at the time of the homicide people are reluctant to talk they have loyalties to different friendships and over time those break down people move on with their lives and they may be willing to share something twenty five years later that they didn't at the time the incident took place yeah changes in their lives and sometimes a guilty conscience and asked well yeah you would hope you're right well we appreciate all your work here rick behind the scenes and we know a lot of things are s you could say she world or excuse me for the arrows in the sword they also have meanings as well the lion stands for dulles courage the arrows stands for readiness in the sword stands for justice cool what better things to have on the path right now and this is part when we built this whole building was installed and i believe it was donated by people that cared about the community and so that we could remember what we stand for here at the mission the police department  great so you are a kid that here i am i am a cadet here at the hauen department of public safety and we could answer a little different then i guess you could say real patrol officers we as good as who are full time college students that's our main our main goal is to become a police officer one day  and we use this ability right here is to get a good foot in the door to learn what we're going into and to really understand all the different facets of the criminal justice system and we work twenty hours a week during the school year and then forty hours a week during the summer ok and then you're also attending classes full time yesterday and classes classes full time and then this on top of it with the ultimate goal of becoming a police officer so you put in hours and hours and hours just like the medical people do before they become doctors and yes yes ma'am right a lot of work goes into on force and but it always helps yeah and you have the background of all the current law center yes ma'am all of that yes ma'am yeah that's a big area as a how many years is that that you have it is a it is a four year degree but here in michigan you're required to go through been here and i've been here for three years now coming up in february and i've treasured every minute of it it's a great learning experience i love the community love the people that i work for and row one when i want to be anywhere else well we really appreciate all your help and i'm sure the department is very grateful having you we have how many cadets right now we have eight could add some like you said we're all college students and we're all in kind of the same work schedule the front office we're always staffed twenty four seven there's a full time  secretary or whatnot during the evening hours but we work to eleven p m at night your crime happens every time i mean any time right day or night and somebody has got to be available to handle that it's not like an octopus where you can just open at a then close at minutes maybe take a little book or calm right it's not but not the usual job but i guess that's the reason i'm going into it i don't want to be stuck by a desk or what not i want don't want to know what i'm on experience each day you know like to help the community anyway i can yeah well that is wonderful we really appreciate your heart in that and appreciate your willingness to serve the community way are also working so hard on your degree and we respect that amount of training for people that are given the responsibility of being an officer so thanks or welcome to the detective bureau section of the holland police department and we're here with detective jim lou diamond who's in charge of our computer crime investigations at the title ok great and so he's the guy who looks into what's going on and the internet and what we need to be aware of as citizens and how we need to protect ourselves from what's going on in the internet now it's just a neutral medium but we all know how it can be used for evil as well as good and you probably know way more about it than we do and we just wanted a little help here for what kind of things do you get into and what does that what would you tell us to be aware of internet safety covers a broad variety of things from to protecting your kids online so i do presentations on this topic i discuss with parents mostly how to keep their kids safe online and i really hit on the fact that they need to take some responsibility in educating themselves because their kids are going to follow it reach their education and technology so the simplest thing to do is if you have a question as somebody who's knows computers or google what your question is you can even go be as simple as how do i protect my kids on line i type google with that you're going to get millions of hits there's a bunch of websites that will come up and they break down specific techniques and software you can use web filters to keep your kids from going to pornography type websites or even get caught up caught up in some types of scams yeah it's so scary because a child can have a computer in their room but inside that computer is the world right here you don't know who that person is really in there so trusting and i guess the perfect point if if you consider it like you're sending your kid out into the world to be all alone they're sitting in front of their computer  if you're not supervising what they're doing you're essentially telling them i'm letting you go outside to be alone in the world without any supervision get your kids to tell you what the passwords are for their facebook accounts  monitor that you are the parent you are responsible they're under eighteen even though they bought that that item and they still live in their house and they need to live by your rules so really it's mostly about parent involvement in it kids don't always like that but they respect us being involved with it otherwise they don't they may not think that we care yeah exactly they may react to it but underneath  you love me enough to ask the tough questions to help me protect myself from myself and some ways right which is kind of a parent job number one and it's not about being liked it's about being respected yes right so they can always come to you if they have a question or if they have a concern yeah you don't necessarily need to be their best friend you need to be their parent and you're responsible for their taking care of them so what are some kind of like warning signs that you know if you see this in near child or you notice whatever on their screen that you would want to get involved in trying to be alone with an electronic device coming into the room and seeing them minimize or closing programs if you know how to check your internet history you can if you don't know you can google that how to check internet history and firefox chrome or internet explorer and have it set to log that history if you have a child that's on the internet for an hour and you come in and you check the history and it's blank they probably deleted it they probably got rid of it and it's kind of a clue there's probably a reason for them to do that then a little telling them that robert it would like that you know and you'll notice behavior changes in your kids if they start to get involved  texting or chatting with somebody on line i always ask the question always asked what's going on in you can trust i usually use the term trust but verify so you want to trust them but verify on occasion what they're telling you is true yeah i mean you still want that big scary scenario of somebody showing up picking up your child in a sneak out of window or something and right think how does that happen you know we've had a few kids in town that have picked up and left left the state to meet with people or the people came here to meet with them in they they met them on a video game parents didn't have any clue where they were they were very devastated and scared of what might have happened thankfully nobody got hurt and they returned home safely you actually think just being  with somebody if the to that you know a lot of these video games have a chat feature so you can chat with people one thing about the internet is unless you talk to the person the next day in person that you that everybody assumes you're that person right and that all that you know really not right you can take based on all the information put on facebook you could take over somebodies pictures and create a facebook page that looks very similar to the s and then it could become them so for people often people tell me oh well i had people i know they're my friends they're the you know it's their name it's their pictures you can use all their information to create a fake account to try to trick them to becoming your friend so be careful if you don't talk to that person and in real life you really don't know who that person that's that you're talking to online wow  self taught and then when i got into law enforcement we started to get into digital friends looks to recover digital evidence and things like that and i've gone to several trainings on that internet safety a member of the internet crimes against children task force in michigan they sent to us sent us to a lot of different types of training for child safety stuff and this is the division no police department had twenty years ago right yeah pro twenty years ago and probably nobody did and still there's a lot of agencies that don't have this capability yeah it's becoming more and more important because we're finding evidence on all types of devices on all types of crimes yeah  and taking care of that train people and taking the time to help us understand it if people have questions they like you said they could google a question are they could ask for a presentation that you can go into more detail when people if if they would want that for a church group or something done that before and done some presentations and then a safety usually hour to an hour and a half presentation mostly for parents can be tailored for teenagers and younger kids but there's also a video that was produced through the child assessment center here in holland that covers a lot of time and thank you for your information and you're protective layer over the community really appreciate and we're really glad to have with us today chief matt messer who is in charge of all of our public safety and maybe you are not aware that the city of holland has combined the police and fire services as far as the administration of it all and so that is was hired originally as police chief right and is now our chief of public safety so both the police department and the fire department are under his administration and then we have four captains under him three in police and captain chris turney in fire and so we've had some presentations on the fire department and all the amazing work that they do in handling unbelievable situations and we thought you probably also be interested in learning about what goes on in law enforcement in the city of holland and so we're glad to be able to take some of your precious time chief messer to talk with us a little bit and i'm sure that not everybody has been in this building and so we're going to kind of walk around and talk to different people in the different divisions of the police department and and is there anything that you think that citizen should know department this department is probably one of the newest buildings within the city and chief john quite off was spearheaded that drive to get this new building and we love it here to mazie in you'll get to see that we welcome anyone that wants to come in to take a look at our building we do tours probably daily we also invite the public to get involved with us to say this is a police academy which actually graduates tonight we have about think thirty to forty citizens will be graduating tonight they come in they view our department they view what we do all of our activities that we're involved in we also have our junior police academy which are seventh and eighth graders and we welcome the public to get their children involved with us we try to establish that positive relationship with children and show them that there is another side of the police officers the normally what you see on t v or when we show up to respond to calls were you have to deal with certain such situations where there's a whole the side of this department that i would welcome the public to come take a look at what we  community yeah i think many people watch t v and see a power trip for people in law enforcement and think that's what it's all about but when i was a part of the west michigan consortium where they brought in all the different police departments  all of western michigan to do training and one of i think the questions i think they asked was why are you in law enforcement and the way overwhelming majority it was that they want to serve that you're here to help and protect people and sometimes that has to look a little ugly but it's in the best interests of the community and we just appreciate all the work that you guys deal with on a daily basis because we don't always do the right thing as yeah there are a lot of things i think that go on that many people aren't aware of behind the scenes here at the police department of the fire and the fire department were also involved with i was able to count the number of activities that were involved in other than dispatched activities you know most people see us as they see us out on the street which really should be what they see is responding to calls me or making traffic stops making arrests those are the things that they associate with the police department  but we do many more things above and beyond that and we were able to count up over ninety other activities that were involved and not involve not including dispatch activities arresting people those kind of activities that people see on t v they see police officers writing traffic tickets and those kind of things that they see as do we do a lot more behind the scenes to help our community than people realize i think when you come in maybe visit with me visit with other officers be involved in our sort of the police academy you learn that wide variety of activities that we're involved in besides what you see that ten percent of what we do where we actually arrest people and do the things that we need to do there's things we need to do but those maybe there are things that we prefer to do with prefer to prevent things before it gets to that level but obviously some point to get to that level and we do what we have to do to make arrests of those kind of things but there's a lot more to what we do than just that yeah you have a community relations committee to yes you know where y to a community members and kind of get a feel for what's going on in their neighborhoods and how to be proactive and yessing bridges with people that we meet first there's every month we have citizens in rubble that numerous individuals involved anything to us listen whatever we need to do will certainly want to do it one of the really important things is been an initiative to have community policing in that apartment you want to talk a little bit about what that is where they work hand in hand with the with the community with organizations with the schools and try to prevent crime establish relationships with individuals with groups to make them feel more comfortable with law enforcement i think sometimes we get the stigma of being authoritative or standoffish or not approachable maybe because of the uniforms we wear and most of those types of things but we're just like any other human being and we should like to hear as much or more about our community than anyone and that's part of their job is to get out there work with their neighborhoods get their relationship building happening which we've we've been successful very successful in doing and that's basically in a nutshell what can we  take officers put them out in certain areas of their communities work with that neighborhood and solve problems and be proactive and that's our preventative measures there's no way to quantify it but it must be huge sure i did making a difference at the ground floor before it blows up into some huge issue it's really difficult the numbers i mean the numbers never show up so that you can't measure i'm right but i certainly think that it's the community policing officers do an outstanding job our philosophy of being community oriented saves of a lot of numbers and i know i've talked to you in the past about this we had an outside independent individual come in this been all over the country and looked at other departments that studies on them and he came to holland several years back when most of us would be three years back conducting a study here and the public safety it is stated was that the police department is basically the the best crime prevention department that he's observed and he's been all over the country so you know i don't know if you know where we stack up but i think we're pretty high yeah yeah you guys handle a huge spectrum of things for such a small town and then you also have like to have time and we've had presidential visits and that that is a whole nother level of maintaining control of traffic and making everything goes smoothly and security on a huge level we've had to deal with  national level security coming here and as well as enforcement from a federal level to which is great i mean we need to have departments that work together and i think maybe doing tulip time has helped us as a as a region and that we get different departments in here besides solving crime and of course the we met conglomerate that helps us with drug enforcement and all of that has definitely people working together but as i've been over the nation of involved in the homicide cases drug cases been all over the us i think west michigan as well from our from my perspective is one of the best areas to work when it comes to collaborating with other law enforcement agencies sheriff's departments the city departments corrections probation the courts i mean we work very very well together and i do think that events like two time presidential visits or those kind of activities where we do draw all those sources you know there's no jurisdictional boundaries and turf wars and those kind of things doesn't exist here which makes my job and all the other one foresman to administrators and officers in the serious jobs much easier to trust a relationship you  we just kind of always had it so hard to appreciate something you've always had scanned like you're going from a good family and all true but we have a great system and where we want to keep it we want to be as proactive as we can in those relationships and make sure that we continue to invest in working together on whatever happens sure i mean community safety in my book obviously i'm probably a little biased but the community safety is number one priority i was here for me but i think for any community because if you don't have  safety you don't feel secure in your own community it's hard to get yourself involved in other activities right well yeah you don't have anything you can't be safe so you know you can't have officers at every corner twenty four seven no  people are kind of the eyes and ears of what is normal activity in a neighborhood and what's a little different so how does like somebody know whether they should call nine one one are what they should do when something just seems a little lack right here are they dispatch and we were well settled this batch we encourage any money to call for any reason to call nine one one people in as well as may not be the emergency well call i want one let the dispatchers are let us determine whether it's an emergency and people people really need to understand is it when they call central dispatch that they gives us allows us to be a little bit more assertive when we show up at scenes because you know not only is it maybe suspicious to a police officer that would become suspicious to a citizen really opens the doors us for us a little bit more so we can really going areas maybe where we would be able to go on our own or if we see something the courts have ruled with what our citizens see something they think is suspicious that it lends a little bit more credibility whether suspicious or not because normal prudent person use this is being suspicious so we certainly encourage anyone to call for any reason called i want one that's why we're here as our jobs we respond to all calls thoroughly when we get a call from a citizen that sees something that may be suspicious and we certainly encourage all of us to this dispute their eyes and ears open for whatever they might see so phones are probably up now everyone also has a cell phone think about eighty five percent of the calls that come into central dispatch are from cell phones no yeah so it doesn't matter if you're in your home or on the street or at a neighbor's house where the store if you see some of them doesn't quite look right you don't your cell phone call us let us come and take a look  really prevent something horrible sure i think it only people are saying that that small bit of big piece of information may lead to something else that we know that may be happening that that person may be involved in other crimes that we're trying to investigate so those little pieces of information are huge for us to continue to investigate crimes i remember going by an open area and seeing a whole bunch of people there and usually that area was always empty and i just kind of thought boy that's different and i and i wondered whether and if  involved in knowing more about the police department i don't know if i would have called but i did and they said all thanks for calling because that group was over here earlier and now they're in we know they're over there and we're just keeping an eye on what's going on and i thought o around and that saved most of city hall right so yeah no matter who you are and wherever you are if something doesn't seem right you have this kind of innate innate sense give it a call make the call yeah so is there a way to find out about the for traffic or any important notices or missing individuals those kind of things we send out on the axle so you can you can access that through our website p that com we also are on facebook now so you can type in to if there was a show we also have e mail night with a visual that he mailed in and had some information about him so some individuals and i was having an e mail conversation with this individual last night so i keep an eye on things in the we have individuals assigned to answer those e mails and  work with facebook and those kind of things we have an individual here that sets up our our internet web site those kind of things so we're certainly moving more and more toward bad because that's that's what society wants and yeah that's how we communicate now that emergency calls that i want one or little every day conversation or maybe a question you may have about something or that's that's where you need to use e mail or a website that kind of thing but you have emergency call nine one one yeah it's kind of like when you call the office and you get a voicemail for somebody says if you need to how hard to get one right away pushes zero yeah and that's nine one one by one for us otherwise it goes into a system of the up yeah well that's a good thing to now yeah is there anything else that you think people should be aware of that you with a lot of e mails lately with some of the gang activity those kind of things and i just want to make sure that the public is aware that we are we are fully aware of what's going on we have databases intelligence information we understand what's going on in our community especially with those kind of activities that those type of investigations continue i know i've received some e mails lately that you know that say the police may not be understand what's going on i want to assure individuals and everyone in our community we do know what's going on and we continue to look into those things investigate them and i think the people can feel pretty comfortable that we do know what's going on sometimes we don't get a lot of cooperation we may not solve every crime but nine times out of ten or even a higher percentage probably know who committed the crimes the matter of being able to prove it a court of law which is which is a big difference  obviously we can't release everything that's going on that would obviously put out there information that we don't want to visual to have so there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes with any police organization that occurs whenever you  time but they do it on steady job and there we also have we met that you mentioned and again team and that's a jurisdiction that's set up were involved in numerous different departments and they gather information on a daily basis and i'm briefed on that i understand what's going work major crimes of cold cases i understand the philosophy of gathered intelligence understand what's going on so it's a focus of mine and we have got the rick walters in charge of that now who wonder stands every well worked with me again team back in the mid ninety's so  we had a good grasp understanding of what's going on yeah well there's a reason that how it was rated one of the tough five safest cities in the country was what it was and i think that goes back to we policing intelligence gathering jurisdictions in the area even like i said probation and parole that's big lot of times on force one doesn't get maybe not get along with probation and parole are two different entities but yeah you know we work very well with them we do sweeps with them our officers work you know directly with them  we keep an eye on our registered sex offenders we have all nearly two hundred in the city we track them understand where they're at not that we were doing wrong or just a matter of we think that's our job we need to understand where they're at they are they report to us  if they're going to report to us we think we feel that we should follow up on that make sure what they're reporting is accurate so you know a lot of things that we do behind the scenes that it was doesn't get out of the public eye but we're we're aware what's going on yeah well we just saw appreciate your vigilance and your level of experience that to know what's a red flag and what isn't and have a whole team that works well together in order to address those kind of concerns that it's really so important  for every one of us to be able to walk down the street and enjoy all that there is in this area and now we just are so grateful for you time and effort and for your coming in and taking time to talk with us about this huge job