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Keystone police chief outlines staffing pressures, training and canine plans in annual report
Summary
The Keystone Police chief presented an annual report highlighting staffing vacancies (three open positions), plans to expand canine capabilities and ongoing data limitations from CAD/RMS that constrain response‑time metrics; councilors asked for clearer monthly metrics and discussed recruitment and retention challenges.
The Keystone Police chief presented the department’s annual report and answered council questions about staffing, training and operations.
The chief said the department currently has three open positions and expects two new hires in August and one recruit entering the academy soon. "We have three open right now," the chief said, describing the hiring and attrition picture and noting that recruiting and lateral hiring incentives in neighboring jurisdictions influence retention.
On canines and mutual aid, the chief said canine deployment depends on pairing a suitable dog with a trained handler and that regional partnerships remain important for coverage. "It depends on the canine... there's a long, convoluted history in this county," the chief said, adding that mutual‑aid arrangements and MOUs underpin most cross‑jurisdictional canine support.
The chief also described technical issues with the CAD/RMS project that have made some response‑time metrics difficult to extract reliably. Staff said they are manually compiling tier‑1 response metrics while the CAD/RMS implementation continues; council members urged staff to produce clearer monthly packages and data for budget decisions.
Council discussion ranged across topics such as community‑service officer recruitment (a recently vacated position that has been reposted), officer wellness and training (including de‑escalation and CIT), and investigative caseloads where the department has several multi‑jurisdictional fraud cases. The chief said the department aims to track better monthly metrics and to present data‑driven staffing recommendations to the manager and finance director during forthcoming budget discussions.
The presentation was informational; council did not take votes on staffing or budget items during the session.
