Chesterfield County police give annual update, cite traffic enforcement, mental‑health co‑response and animal shelter plans

Colonel Carpenter of the Chesterfield County Police Department presented the department’s annual briefing to the Board of Supervisors, reporting traffic enforcement operations, crime totals, volunteer support and planned facility and technology upgrades.

Carpenter said the department’s mission rests on “the preservation of human life, the protection of the vulnerable, and problem‑solving partnerships,” and walked supervisors through operational statistics for 2024 and early 2025. He summarized traffic, crash and enforcement numbers, volunteer and evidence‑room activity, animal‑services outcomes, specialized teams’ work and planned projects.

The numbers: department officers handled more than 205,000 calls for service, conducted roughly 32,000 traffic stops and investigated more than 5,000 crashes in the period reported. Of those crashes, the department said 976 involved injuries and 32 were fatal; 22 of the fatal crashes were investigated by the Chesterfield County Police Department and 10 by the Virginia State Police. Officers issued more than 21,000 summonses, wrote over 15,000 warnings and made about 847 DUI arrests. The department reported processing about 1,300 field interviews.

Traffic enforcement and community tip. Carpenter described a March 13 community‑requested traffic enforcement operation on Chippenham Highway and Parkway. “We gave advance notification to the community,” he said, and officers stopped 236 vehicles, issued 313 summonses and 38 written warnings in a one‑day operation. He added that two drivers were stopped at 104 mph in a 60‑mph zone and another was a 15‑year‑old stopped at 79 mph in a 60‑mph zone.

Volunteers, evidence and staffing. The department reported more than 23,000 volunteer hours in 2024, 16,000 pieces of evidence received into storage, about 81,000 evidence transactions and hiring of 65…