Hello Mayor and Council members. I hope all of you have had a good month as we put away all of the all the holiday decorations and lights and pray for spring. This month, the police department held a holiday gathering for all department members and their spouses or significant others. This is something we have not been able to do for the last two years. We were able to use the space at the local airport and had plenty of room to social distance. Dinner was provided and we did our usual white elephant gift exchange. I was great to be able to connect with my staff and family members that I do not get to see often. It was a small slice of normalcy and my staff truly enjoyed it.

After hearing from Councilor Walker at a recent council meeting regarding awards and recognition for staff members, I wanted to let all of you know that I do have three life saving awards that I am working on now. After the work on my end is completed, I will get them on a council agenda to be presented to those three officers. I don’t anticipate this to happen until sometime in April as I had to order additional items such as the official medals and awards.

Officer Quentin Carter was recently sworn in as our newest Sandy Police Officer and is off and running with his training. Officer Ryan Anderson is set to be sworn in during the March 7th council meeting and he will start with us on February 28th. This is exciting news and it will put us at full staffing for the time being. I say that because we anticipate an officer, Sergeant Bickle, to leave our agency some time in the near future, possibly some time in April. We obviously don’t want to lose any of our personnel but Sgt. Bickle is moving his family to another state and pursuing another career path. This has nothing to do with his employment with the City of Sandy, in fact, Sgt. Bickle has always loved his job here and has been a dedicated employee for years. It’s simply somewhat of a lifelong dream for him and his family to relocate to a warmer climate. The good news is that we already have a candidate that is in the background phase of our process to fill the vacant position that will be created when Sgt. Bickle leaves. We will need to promote someone in our department to fill the Sergeants position and have candidates for that position already.

Lastly, the body worn camera program is still ongoing. Equipment has been arriving but not all is on site at this time. I am still hoping for a pilot program to be up and running sometime in the spring of this year.

That is all for now. See all of you soon. Chief Roberts