Public   
Safety

We Must Support Those Who Protect Us

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Providing for public safety is one of the key functions of our government, and yet this is something that we have been challenged with for years. The Fremont Police Department is chronically understaffed. This puts considerable stress on our officers, needlessly adds to staffing costs through relentless mandatory overtime, and ultimately makes our community less safe.

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Fremont, like cities across America, has been struggling to fully staff our law enforcement. The result is that at any given time, there is roughly one officer per ten square miles of city. As we recently saw in Niles, our police cannot respond to two separate issues at the same time. Regardless of the reasons why, this is a real problem. We all see this every day as a lack of traffic enforcement, slow response times to property crimes, and more. This is directly impacting how safe people feel in our city.

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• The National Benchmark: The FBI indicates that the national average is roughly 2.3 officers for every 1,000 citizens. For mid-to-large cities, a normal baseline ranges from 1.6 to 3.0 officers per 1,000 residents.

• The Fremont Shortfall: Fremont fluctuates down around 0.7 to 0.9 officers per 1,000 residents. That is roughly half of the low end of where we should be to properly support our community.

 

Commending Our Force—But We Need Reform

This is not to take away from what our officers do for the public. Quite the contrary—it makes what they are able to achieve that much more impressive. Overall violent crime in Fremont continues to trend below national averages. 

 

Yet this cannot go on. We cannot continue to rely on burning out our current force to keep our streets safe. We must find innovative ways to recruit, competitive paths to retain talent, and real solutions to better support our officers. 

 

Join me in this election and help solve this problem.