6/24/25 Council Meeting [103:11-108:13]

that's manpower from 15 to 20 years ago. That's what we're working with right now. We're doing that with 20, 25 demands in calls for service. Our calls for service grew up a rear. They increased by 11% last year. Just for example, so far in June, we've had 934 calls for service. So you can see, I mean, we're probably going to increase again for the year. You know, we're probably having over 12,000 calls for service, so another 10% probably increase in calls this year. That's up to that. The calls are more dangerous. We have more mental health calls. We obviously have the state federal requirements and mandates that keep going up every single year. They don't lighten up on us. Liability is either of, we just continue every year. We have to be more and more. And it's very unsafe. We're running a lot of shifts, especially at night. And then also in days a lot of times where we only have two officers. Trying to cover the entire county. And that's kind of where our, you know, me covering calls and things like that kind of come in at. But think about how dangerous that is. They just have two officers covering the entire county. Think about how long people can have to wait for service. When they want something or they need us, you know, one call can tie up two officers for hours depending on what it is. So we can, you know, a lot of times we have to put our needs in our seats on a hold because we just don't have enough people to go take every single call. So think about that if, like, if your house is being broken into or you've got a family member that's got an emergency that needs to police or you're in a crash somewhere and you need an officer. I mean, some people are just having to wait right now. So if you don't prearge, I mean, you can't, like if somebody's gone and it's lifting somebody up to get out of the floor, and you don't go to those calls. And you get a call. Those are the kind of calls we go to, Jamie. Those that's volunteer fire department that's EMS calls. I'm talking police calls, crashes. I was just saying. There are worries. There are more urgent need. Yeah, I mean, obviously, obviously, we do that. But if we have two officers working and we have a personal injury crash on State Route 37. And we're trying to direct traffic. We're trying to do the crash report. We have to go to hospitals to get blood draws by state law. I'm going to have the numbers. Pitching, what is on 37? I'm going to turn lightly with what I say here because I do a little state police. But state police has, as they have manpower bones too. And I would say eight out of ten times when we call the state police, they don't have anybody to send this or they will tell us this unit is in Martin'sville or North of the moment that they don't just have a bunch of people down here all the time. You know, they don't talk about that. I didn't even have this in here. That made me think of it. We also have, you know, we back up in Mitchell when they are. They might have a couple officers working. If they have something, if something major, but they know a little. We cover a lot. They have two full-time officers or two full-time officers can't cover seven days a week, 24 hours a day. So, you know, probably 40% of the time, we are the people that respond to anything in a litig because they don't have anybody working. So really what I'm just trying to say is, like, we keep being more and more, but what I have to do is less. And that puts our officers safety in a huge risk. It cuts services, safety and security to our citizens. You know, people want to feel safe and know that they have police officers to respond when needed. They want us to have enough officers to give our all to investigation. You know, if you get broken into, you want us to have the main power to not only just go take that call, but you also want us to, I think, probably to investigate it and follow up on it and try to solve it and get your stuff back and things like that. So, I mean, like, going through a call is not just going to be a done in 30 minutes. It's sometimes it's days worth of work toward it. And you know, I think Lord Scanney is a candidate who supports law and order. I feel like, you know, we get lots of feedback on what we do and the effort we put in. And I think I've done exactly what I can't paint on three years ago, what 90% of our citizens voted for. You know, that's professionalism, quality, accountability, productive policing, reduced crime, school safety, better services, not only on the road, but also on the jail, the programs who put in their side. I mean, I feel like we're doing what the citizens asked us to do, but when we keep operating this short, it makes it harder and harder to do that.