Columbia Police Chief Michael Kelly sent a very clear message this week when he addressed members of the Columbia Rotary Club — committing crimes or acts of unacceptable behavior will not be tolerated in this community, as long as he is the chief of police.
Kelly presented the Columbia Police Department's Strategic Plan Update and Vision 2021, which is a very thorough, detailed and well-organized publication that outlines many of the department's policies and procedures, projections and goals, recognition of accomplishments and statistical records of calls, incidents, etc.
In addition to serving as a sort of a status report card for the department, it also clearly describes where the department was a year ago, where it stands today and its projected plans for the remainder of 2021.
Since his appointment as chief three years ago, Kelly has made it a top priority and gone to great lengths to make the Columbia Police Department operations as transparent as possible, which has proven to be a very well-accepted approach from the community. This strategic plan report is a great example of the department's efforts and success in remaining transparent.
"The past year has been extremely challenging for us all — our families, the department, the city, the state, the nation, everyone," Kelly said. "We've had to learn how to redo a lot of things, including changing our behavior. We've had to adapt to some enormous changes in our world, and it hasn't been easy."
The Covid pandemic, Kelly said, which included those mandatory social distancing measures and unprecedented social adjustments that kept people isolated for long periods of time, directly resulted in some major increases in criminal activity that CPD officers had to respond to.
"We had to quickly rethink some of our procedures and goals on suppressing crime," Kelly said. "When you have people required to quarantine and stay isolated for extended periods of time like that, they get restless because it's not normal. We've experienced some major spikes, particularly in domestic violence cases and calls involving gangs and shootings. Thankfully, we only ended up having one fatality, which is still not acceptable, but we credit this success to some great response from our citizens who have gotten involved and notified law enforcement."
In addition to Covid, Kelly also referred to the recent freezing weather and ice storm that struck the community and brought about other challenges that are often difficult to prepare for in advance. During those critically cold days, Kelly said he could not be more proud of his CPD officers because they took it upon themselves to coordinate and execute several community support projects for the needy.
CPD officers delivered soup and food, gloves and blankets, and even collected funds to pay for hotel rooms for many local residents who lost power or were unable to get to a store for supplies, as well as offering assistance to several homeless individuals to help them survive safely the dangerously cold weather.
Kelly said one of the latest upgrades the department is very proud of is the launching of the Relay App, which is a new citizen-to-officer notification system that's phone-based, and was primarily developed for citizens to alert an officer directly if they're concerned about a possible criminal situation.
Instead of dialing 911, which should definitely still be used to call in emergencies, the Relay App should be used for non-emergency alerts, and it goes directly from the caller's phone to every on-duty officer at the time. It creates a location "pin" for the officer to respond and react to the situation. It also allows the officer to reply back and provide the citizen caller with a status report on the matter. The Relay App is free of charge for the user, and it's simple to download from your app store.
"We're extremely proud and excited to be able to offer this Relay App service to our citizens," Kelly said. "It's one more step toward accomplishing our mission of keeping this community closely connected to their police department."
Kelly said plans are currently underway for city officials to meet with representatives from C Spire to review the internet and phone service contracts, which includes the police department's equipment. Based on preliminary estimates, a proposed revision of the city's plan would not only increase its internet strength/speed from 10mb to 100mb, but also save the city approximately $16,000 in annual plan costs.
