hi I'm Chief John Mesa and welcome to message from the chief thank you for joining me and this gives me the opportunity to explain to you and give you some updates here at Mesa PD first of all I'm proud to say we receive the keys to our new md helicopter which now gives us three fully functional helicopters which will give us more air support as our patrol operations are out on the street it will allow our helicopter to be up in the air at longer periods of time and overall better functionality in our patrol operations second I want to congratulate the 25 new recruits who just graduated our police academy now these 25 recruits will be in the FTO program where they'll spend the next 20 weeks writing with a training officer until they're ready to hit the street on their own we anticipate these officer will be ready to be solo officers come early November so I'm very proud and excited to have them out serving our Police Department and serving our community the next thing I want to talk about is our crime numbers we track part 1 crimes which part 1 crimes are your serious crimes like aggravated assaults homicides rapes burglaries commercial burglaries and theft's right now our overall part 1 crimes are down three percent and the most impressive one is our violent crime is down thirteen percent now how do we do that it's a variety of ways that we do that we do intelligence-led policing which means what we do is we look at all our crime data on a 24-hour basis and we use that crime data to set missions and set operations for our patrol officers and then they take those missions out and do the enforcement in their particular beats it's we utilize also CompStat or it's an accountability tool where we make sure that we are our strategies being effective so along with that crime fighting piece is our community engagement piece is what I've really encouraged over the last four months since I took over chief through the creation of our new community engagement Bureau and employee services and really the focus of that is it's it's both making sure that our employees are our officer wellness employee wellness is taking care of and in relation how is our engagement with the community we out there building relationships are we out there building partnerships with our community because that is a vital part of our success and it's a vital part of our community safety so in closing I just want to say this Police Department is dedicated to working with you our Police Department is a very proud Police Department with sincere commitment to working hard fighting crime and working together with our community and if if you have things in your neighborhood where you feel are suspicious please call us if you have seen an officer out out on the beat you know don't be afraid to stop and say hello and ask how it's going in your neighborhood because I really want that feel where we are connected with the community so once again thank you for joining me and I look forward to talking to you again you you