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Police chief reports 2024 training and crime trends, flags data limitations in case-management system
Summary
The Madison Police Department reported nearly 1,400 training hours in 2024, staffing and hiring plans, a drop in reported thefts, and data-coding issues in the department’s case-management system that complicate tracking overdoses and drug-related calls.
Madison Police Chief Scott Tucker presented a year-end report for 2024, outlining training totals, hiring plans, crime trends and ongoing work to improve the department’s case-management system.
"We did a total of almost 1,400 hours across the whole department in 2024, which is about 50 hours per officer on average," Chief Scott Tucker said, noting that about 30 of those hours per officer were conducted in-house and the department’s 2025 goal is to increase in-house training to about 40 hours per officer while sending each officer to at least one outside training.
Tucker described defensive-tactics training requirements established by the state law-enforcement training board, saying the department must touch on 14 techniques within a two-year cycle and expects to complete the current cycle in 2025.
On staffing, the chief said the department has a hiring pool of five qualified candidates and expects to extend up to four conditional offers; some conditional offers from late 2024 were already placed with candidates enrolled in the May academy. New hires would enter an internal field-training program and be expected to patrol independently in the early fall.
Chief Tucker reported a decline in reported thefts from 477 incidents in 2023 to 342 in 2024 and attributed at least part of the drop to increased visible patrols, security checks and extra officers on business/security patrols.
Council members pressed the chief on data comparators and coding. One council member asked whether the city compares statistics with similar-sized jurisdictions for benchmarking; Tucker said some public data are available via NIBRS for violent-crime comparisons and that he can reach out to peer cities for more context. On drug and overdose calls, Tucker said apparent decreases in overdose incident codes likely understate the true caseload because dispatch and the case-management system may code the same incident several ways ("overdose," "breathing problems," "unresponsive," "deceased subject"). He said he plans to work with dispatch and the case-management vendor to standardize coding to better capture overdoses and drug-related incidents.
Tucker also described improvements in internal leadership communication, including weekly captains’ meetings, and neighborhood outreach: neighborhood-watch meetings in the Walnut Street and West End areas and plans to install neighborhood-watch signage.
The chief’s remarks were delivered as an informational report; no formal action was required.
