Hello Mayor and Council Members. I hope all of you enjoyed the month of May and the Memorial Day holiday weekend. The weather did not cooperate but it is still nice to have a long weekend. I am happy to report that we are now fully staffed. With Officer Scott Jones starting on May 24th, we are at full staffing here at the police department. It took our office nearly two years to hire our new officers. I’m very excited that we were able to get such highly qualified personnel to come to Sandy and be part of our team and community. With the three officers that were hired along with two others that were hired as a result of the public safety fee, half of our patrol unit represent officers that have been hired within the last three years. Quite an accomplishment from our team as well as Human Resources Director Angie Welty. With so many police agencies struggling to hire good police officers, this says a great deal about what our agency and our community has to offer.

In other news, I wanted to give council an update on the body camera project. All of the equipment has finally arrived and installation of the equipment, software etc, has begun. We recently had one of our vehicles upfitted with the new camera system. This was done at the upfitters shop. The rest of the upfitting will be done by our installer here at the police department which will make things easier as we will not have to transport and pick up vehicles. The Watchguard/Motorola folks are working with our IT department to complete any software/equipment installations that need to happen here at the police department. Training for the body cameras has not been scheduled as of this time but I’m hoping this happens sometime within the next four to six weeks. We are still looking at about two months before the pilot program is in place.

We are already preparing for the Sandy Mountain Festival that will begin on July 7th with the parade. This is always a big undertaking for the police department with the traffic issues that this creates for a short period of time. I’m really looking forward to having folks be able to come and enjoy our festival. It feels like were officially getting back to some normal activities here.

We are about two months into our new patrol schedule that features twelve hour patrol shifts. This is set for a one year trial basis and was agreed upon by the city and the Clackamas County Peace Officer’s Association. The schedule allows for better coverage and more time off for our officers. So far, we are getting positive feedback from our patrol officers. I am hoping that after the trial period of one year, we can implement this schedule on a full time basis. I will periodically update council on this as we get further into the trial period.

That is all for now. Have a great month and I will see all of you soon. Chief Roberts