Las Cruces - Recently the Las Cruces Police Department hosted a town hall meeting with a twist.
Dialogue was encouraged as community members got to choose a table from one of the topics. They included, internal affairs, criminal investigations, recruiting and training, patrol, traffic and community outreach. Once participants chose, they got to talk to professionals about the topic, after 30 minutes, they switched tables.
"I'm not sure what prompted it but I just thought about ways to engage the community more instead of just me talking up there and answering questions. I wanted to get my people involved more. They have a lot of knowledge,” said Las Cruces Police Chief Jeremy Story.
LCPD personnel were at each table to answer questions and to provide community members with information. Academy sergeant for the Las Cruces Police Department, Josh Milks, was at one of those tables.
“I want the community to be able to ask those hard questions that maybe some people might be afraid to ask. I think it's important that we understand each other from a professional and respected standpoint, being able to communicate with different sections about issues or problems that affect your community, reaches out to us and lets us know, as kind of the end user, what we need to do to help to provide better police service to the citizens of Las Cruces,” Milks said.
Norma Fernandez didn't know what to expect when she came to the meeting, but she said she was surprised by the outcome.
“Actually, I came with my son and his wife. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I thought any interaction with the police department would be a good thing. And I am so glad to see the response.” Fernandez said.
Chief Story started the meeting by listing crime statistics for the city. According to a second quarter crime report done from January- June of this year, there was an 18% reduction in violent crime, a 9% reduction in property crime, and a 10% reduction overall.
“We’re way higher than we want to be but we've seen these reductions and that’s getting us back to where we were before the climb. So we still have work to do but let's celebrate those little wins,” Story said.
This meeting was not only a way to inform and include the community, but Chief Story said he hoped it would help shine light on issues and create a pathway to solutions.
“We think we know what the problems are. I think for the most part we do, but sometimes seeing it from the perspective of the community is good .And also there’s problems we might not be aware of and so one identifying the problems and even more importantly try to find some solutions.”
This type of format allows for more transparency, according to Sgt. Milks.
“I think it's important that as a law enforcement agency we're transparent. I think one of the biggest misconceptions that people have is that police officers want to keep everything a secret. We want people to know exactly what we're looking for, what we're doing and what our training entails so that they can have a better understanding because at the end of the day we are all citizens of Las Cruces ourselves.”
Las Cruces City Counselor Bill Mattiace said he attends all the town hall meetings held by Chief Story and he shared what something he found interesting valuable at the meeting.
“Crime is still a number one topic but we had both community engagement that was good about the public knowing that they need to actually report crime, make the reports, get it to dispatch so that there's a record.”
During the meeting, police personnel and community members were writing down questions, complaints, cases, and suggestions, which, according to Chief Story, will go to the appropriate personnel and will be dealt with accordingly.
“All the issues we’re talking about whether it's crime, homelessness, the juvenile issues, those are community problems. They're not just police problems so if we want to actually solve them, we have to come together as the police, the community, all the different organizations, our providers and this is just one way to do that,” Story said.
According to counselor Mattiace and resident Norma Fernandez, the recruiting and training section of the meeting was helpful.
“You know what? I was really impressed with the recruiting and training. I didn't realize that now with social media, with the camera technology, quite a complicated very sophisticated camera technology. And then it also does the reporting so that there's less time writing reports and more time in the streets patrolling," Mattiace said.
“I also asked about recruitment, especially with Hispanic Americans, you know I think it's very important that they be a part of this,” Fernandez said, “And I hope they get more recruitment for that,” Fernandez said.
According to Sgt. Milks, getting more recruits is a priority.
“For us right now we currently have 26 cadets in our police academy. If we can have a couple of large academies like that following up, we can start to branch out into more specialized divisions so that we can have people being met at their need when they have an officer for a special problem.”
According to Chief story, the next academy will start in January and there may be more meetings like this held in the future.
