Tempe Fighting Crime With Less Money

Tempe is a great community to live in. Tons of housing choices, good schools, good transportation system and some great people make up this awesome community. While budget cuts are a reality everywhere you look, Tempe has done a pretty good job in not having to severely hinder our way of life. Here’s an example from a recent article talking about Tempe Police Chief Tom Ryff “Doing More With Less.”

According to Chief Tom Ryff, a deep commitment to protect and serve by the entire department was at the core of helping to fight crime with less money.

"Significant and unavoidable budget cuts resulted in layoffs for some, increased workload for others, and a commitment from everyone to do whatever was necessary to protect those to which we took an oath."

It isn't just this deep-rooted department-wide commitment that resulted in our lower crime numbers, it was also a focus on technology and community building that helped. According to Chief Ryff:

"I have placed an emphasis on developing law-enforcement and community partnerships, procuring technology, hiring, retaining and promoting the best and brightest employees, and empowering the department's police leaders by encouraging them to develop new and innovative strategies to fight crime."

Just a few of the new innovative ways that the Tempe Police Department is fighting crime mentioned by Chief Ryff include:

"The deployment of two Patrol ACTION Teams which target identified crime trends in Tempe neighborhoods and use a variety of uniformed and non-uniformed enforcement methods to eradicate those trends"

and perhaps one of the bigger things accomplished by the Tempe Police Department in recent years was also given credit by Chief Ryff:

"The creation of the Crime and Intel Center, which increases the organization's tactical crime analysis and intelligence capabilities and allows the organization to focus on analyzing and predicting crime, and taking criminals off the street before they offend again."

Chief Ryff goes on to mention other things that the Tempe Police Department is doing to fight crime and make Tempe a safer place for everyone - and we will keep everyone updated when the 2010 crime numbers are reported.  If you live in Tempe, you can keep up with Chief Tom Ryff on Twitter and Facebook

Just yesterday, it was announced that Tempe Police Chief Tom Ryff is going to be receiving an award at the upcoming Tempe City Council Meeting on Thursday.

From azcentral:

Alberto Gutier, director of the AZ Governor's Office of Highway Safety, said in a letter that he plans to present the award to Ryff at Thursday's Tempe City Council meeting. "After his appointment as Chief over four years ago, Tom Ryff assembled an executive team and command staff to implement a reorganization strategy that has transformed the Tempe (Police Department) into a technologically advanced law enforcement agency."

In a letter that was sent to Mayor Hugh Hallman asking for the time in the upcoming council meeting by Gutier outlined just a few of the programs related to traffic enforcement and safety in which Chief Ryff was instrumental and for which he is going to receive the award:

• Established and implemented the Major Collision Investigations Team
• Institutionalized the concept of specialization in the Traffic Bureau
• Promoted the use of technology for the investigation of Vehicular Crimes
• Implemented and taught Accident Reconstruction curriculum at the national level
• Implemented and created curriculum for officer training in Impairment recognition
• Emphasized training in effective criminal prosecution for impaired driving violations
• Emphasized officer use of criminal statutes to achieve prosecution in DUI cases
• Worked with GOHS to establish the grant program by which law enforcement agencies can share resources for statewide DUI task forces

It’s no big secret that budget Tempe has faced budget cuts like most other cities around the country. It’s good to see the Tempe Police Department getting creative amidst our budget cuts. The official numbers for crime rates in Tempe should be released soon according to Tempe Police Chief Tom Ryff's most recent opinion piece in the Tempe Republic and the good news is that overall crime continued to decline in spite of budget cuts experienced in 2010.