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JJANUARYANUARY 20122012 VVOLUMEOLUME V V -- IISSUESSUE 11

Our MissionOur Mission

Work in partnership with our community to protect life and property, reduce crime, and enhance the security and quality of liWork in partnership with our community to protect life and property, reduce crime, and enhance the security and quality of li fe fe in our cityin our city

Centralia Police Department PO Box 609, 118 W. Maple Street Centralia, WA 98531 www.cityofcentralia.com / cpd@cityofcentralia.com 1-800-748-6422 or 740-2726

Fast Facts

In 2011 CPD officers were involved in 3 vehicle pur-suits. One of the pursuits resulted in the pursued ve-hicle being involved in a single car traffic collision.

In 2011 CPD officers had to use force to make arrests 131 times. This included 43 displays of firearms in confrontations with known or suspected felons.

In 2011 CPD officers used Tasers on 44 occasions, 24 of which involved in the display only of the weapon to the suspect to insure compliance.

In 2011 there were 12 pro-fessional standards investi-gations regarding the con-duct of CPD officers. In 10 of those investigations, alle-gations against the officer were sustained.

Do you have a question about the law, police procedures, policing tactics? Why we write tickets on

some people we stop and not oth-ers? Send it in - we will pick ques-tions e-mailed to us and provide an opinion, answer, department proce-

dure or practice, or what the law says. E-mail your question to

cpd@cityofcentralia.com.

ANOTHER ONE IN THE BOOKS

Well, we ended at 11A22627 and the next minute it was 12A00001 - that’s how the end of the year

passes at CPD. I have mentioned this before but police departments are like baseball statisticians, we keep track of everything. We really are a bit anal about numbers - but they do tell a story. Here is the story of 2011.

The department spent $5,156,645 providing law enforcement and emergency management services to our community, a per capita cost of $313.67. It cost $14,128 each day to operate the department in 2011.

Crime in the community was down compared to 2010 (specific data will be released in early February), con-tinuing a downward trend since 2005.

Calls for service were down from 2010 (about 5.8%) but felony arrests were up by over 68% (over 500). Each day in 2011 CPD officers served about three warrants, made a couple of felony arrests, responded to a couple of traffic collisions, is-sued three traffic citations, made about four misdemeanor criminal arrests, and answered over 60 calls for service.

More than 1,000 cases were referred to our detective division and our anti-crime unit with 448 clearances dur-ing the course of the year.

Two of our officers retired during the year (Officer Paul McCormick and

Officer Christie Fitzgerald) and one individual joined the ranks (Officer Adam Haggerty). We currently have two vacancies which we anticipate filling in April and May.

Our active volunteer program (we have several programs including Amateur Radio Emergency Services- ARES, Community Emergency Re-sponse Teams - CERT, Volunteers in Police Service - VIPS, and our Commissioned Reserve Police Offic-es) donated more than 8,000 hours of service in 2011, the equivalent of four full-time employee positions.

CPD has a code enforcement pro-gram, working with other city depart-ments to deal with violations of our development, building, nuisance, animal, and parking violations. That work is performed by limited com-missioned community services offic-ers. Last year this group handled over 650 animal complaints, 565 on street (non overtime) parking com-plaints, along with more than 200 nuisance code violations. This in addition to providing security at mu-nicipal court proceedings, transport-ing prisoners, and serving warrants.

In 2011, the department also imple-mented some new programs , includ-ing:

A traffic school in cooperation with our municipal court so that first time, low level traffic offend-ers could attend a traffic safety school and not have the citation go on their driving record

An exclusively electronic case setting notification system for all

(CONTINUED - PAGE 3)

2

Centralia Police

Citizens’ Academy

By Carla Penley

(Ed. Note - Carla is a Commu-nity Services Officer with the Department and is our Volun-teer Coordinator)

The 24th Centralia Police De-partment’s Citizens’ Academy scheduled to begin

on March 29th is one of Centralia Police Depart-

ments Community Policing programs. The Academy will run for nine weeks on Thursday evenings

from 6-9 p.m. and is limited to 30 stu-dents. The Community Policing

philosophy encourages a more

meaningful dialog between policing agencies and the communities they

serve. This is our opportunity to show how we operate and the challenges we

face. The main

goal of this program is to build good relation-

ships within the com-munity by working to-

gether with our citizens to create a common un-

derstanding and sup-

port of the Centralia Po-lice Department and law

enforcement as a whole. Safe communities are a shared responsibility. We want people to be stake-

holders in the community to work with us to keep

it a safe place to live. Community support and un-derstanding creates a valuable crime fighting/

problem solving partnership.

Over the nine weeks students will learn all aspects

of how the police department works, including pa-

trol procedures, which shows people how and why officers do things in the course of their daily duties.

They will see and hear about the potential danger

police officers face every day from a common traf-

fic stop to entering

a domestic violence situation. They’ll

meet officers from various depart-

ments including

Street Crimes, Traf-fic, K-9 and SWAT. Detectives will also talk about

sex crimes, fraud and identity theft. Students will gain an awareness of crime and prevention so they

may keep from becoming victims themselves and how to accurately report a crime in a timely

manner. Participants will get an inside

look at the selection and training of our officers and how the Centralia

Police Department operates. The academy consists of both class-

room and “hands on” instruction

taught by department personnel and in-cludes the hugely popular and fun firearms day

out at the police range. We will be firing an array of duty and special weapons. Additional topics cov-

ered will include the very colorful history of the Centralia Police Department and some of the more

interesting cases they have been involved with.

An often misunderstood and negatively portrayed

job, this is an opportunity to come and meet the Chief of Police along with many officers, ask ques-

tions and really see what it’s like to be a police officer. Students will gain a tremendous amount of

insight and under-standing of the job.

This Academy re-

flects the desire of the Centralia Police

Department to pos-itively interact with

people, not just be

reactive and rein-force the good work that is done on a daily basis,

but often goes unnoticed. We value the input from citizens and in turn want to continue to provide

good service. Bottom line is, it’s a lot of fun, you

will see some cool stuff and get a behind the scenes look at how the Centralia Police Department

does business.

Note: The Centralia Police Department Citizens’ Academy received the Association of Washington

Cities Gold Municipal Achievement Award for Com-munity Policing and also the National League of

Cities Achievement Award.

“If you put everything off until you are sure of it, you’ll get nothing done” - Andrew Jackson

To sign up for the Citizens’

Academy, call or stop by

the department and re-

quest an application.

3

THE DATA PAGE This page presented for those of you who love “looking at the numbers””

Index Crime Nov. YTD

Murder 0 1

Rape 1 15

Robbery 2 15

Felony Assault 2 50

Burglary 13 145

Theft 38 519

Auto Theft 3 53

Arson 0 1

Total 59 799

Department Category Dec. 2011 2010

Calls for Service and Complaints: 1672 22627 24038

Traffic Infraction Notices Issued: 52 1178 1465

Criminal Citations Issued: 88 1044 1143

Felony Arrests (non warrant): 46 508 302

Warrants Served/ Felony Misdemeanor 67 852 792

Summons Requests: 5 64 57

Juvenile Arrests and Referrals: 2 84 155

Traffic Collision Investigations/Reports: 40 518 549

Tot a l Cr i me : 2 0 0 7 - 2 0 11

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

2007 98 191 288 371 459 545 631 720 825 902 1007 1097

2008 89 193 307 407 528 615 709 798 889 1012 1102 1145

2009 93 148 208 281 339 409 483 544 606 680 770 863

2010 166 252 365 463 583 685 784 860 967 1062 1135 1218

2011 88 143 209 297 378 446 528 597 680 740 799

Jan Feb M ar Apr M ay Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

Ce nt r a l i a P a r t I I nde x Cr i me ; 2 0 0 1 - 2 0 11

783

88

1,453

1,145

1,218

872

1,037

998

782

1,124

1,382

989

1,487

1,1771,140

1,120

99 108 9481

777195709085

863

1,0971,066

1,247

1,582

1,205 1,230

-

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

1,600

1,800

2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Pr oper ty Cr i me V i ol ent Cr i me Index T otal

2011 P ro jected - based

o n YT D thro ugh

N o vember

Our electronic crime reporting format to the FBI has changed. While the information will be more

detailed, it will not be as timely. The information

contained in these two graphs and the table at the top right of this report will be as of the end of two

months prior to the publication of this newsletter. .

Municipal and Superior Court cases, eliminating paper service of these no-tices, alleviating lost notic-es and logging require-ments by clerical staff.

The sale and logging of dog licenses within the police department. Trans-ferring this duty from the city clerk’s office has re-sulted in greater coordina-tion in terms of logging licensed animals in our county wide case manage-ment system to facilitate a more efficient return of lost animals to their owners.

We implemented a new crime reporting system (National Incident Based Reporting System - NIBRS) which collects and reports greater information and detail regarding crime in our community.

Finally, and most importantly, in a year that exploded with police officers being killed and assaulted nationwide, the de-partment’s staff suffered no significant line of duty injuries in 2011. I hope the same is true in 2012.

(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1)

4

MEET OUR OFFICERS

My name is Ruben

Ramirez and my K9 partner is Lobo. I

have worked for the

Centralia Police De-partment for over

ten years. I was born in El Grullo,

Mexico and came to the United States at

6 years old. My fam-

ily worked as mi-grant farmers for

years. In fact, I was working for Leprechaun Hol-stein as a dairy herdsman when I met Dwight

Withrow. My love for police work started then, with

ride-alongs with Dwight who was a long time Ser-geant for the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office. From

there, I took a position at Centralia OK Tire. While working at Centralia Ok Tire, I took a voluntary

position as a Reserve Police Officer with the Cen-tralia Police Department. Fortunately, my bosses at

Centralia OK Tire were generous and allowed me

Saturdays off to move through the Reserve Acade-my and work down the road toward becoming a

full-time Police Officer. After years of hard work and voluntary hours, I was hired by the Centralia

Police Department as a full-time Police Officer.

Currently, I am one of two K-9 handlers for the department. I also serve as a SWAT team member,

a Defensive Tactics Instructor, a Spanish transla-

tor, and patrol bike instructor. In 2010 I was part-nered with Lobo, which means “Wolf” in Spanish,

Lobo has been a big change in the lives of my whole family. Lobo works according to a pack men-

tality- which means there is an established pecking

order in our household as far as the dog is con-cerned. He believes I am the Alpha- the number

one man in charge and he is number two. This cre-ates drama in our house as he plays with his

‘siblings’- Bo (17) and Leticia (13)- and demon-

strates his higher rank with my wife by pushing her and running into her, especially when her arms are

full. My wife swears he is laughing when he does it! Lobo is very popular with the public but is in

constant need of training and attention. He is very high maintenance, but we love the peace and se-

curity he brings to our home and to me while I’m

on duty. He has also served the community very well as the youngest K9 on the force- with over 20

captures to date. He loves to work and has incred-ible drive.

In my spare time, I coach soccer, work with the

Special Olympics Law Enforcement Torch Run as a board member, along with my son, train my dog,

make as many of my kid’s sporting events as I can-

and love to hunt. My family enjoys adventurous travel! We are very close knit and truly enjoy each

other’s company.

In addition to Officer Ramirez and Lobo, the Department has a second K-9 unit, Sergeant Brian Warren

and his partner Kayo. They join a rich tradition of Police Service Dogs (PSD) dating back to 1980. Cen-tralia Police Department has had a K-9 unit in service continuously for

the past 32 years. CPD has a rich tradition of very successful K-9 teams with literally hundreds of successful tracks, captures, and evi-

dence finds. Our dogs are dually certified for general police duty and

as narcotics detection dogs. Officer Tracy Murphy, the handler of retired and now deceased PSD Bak, is a certified K-9 Master Trainer,

thus providing us with the ability to train new dogs and handlers without going to an outside training facility.

The CPD K-9 program is supported exclusively by the citizens of our community through their donations, including donated routine medi-

cal care, food, and other support. The only taxpayer expense is the cost of the officer and his/her

equipment. We thank our citizens for their wonderful support of this program.