The Delaware Gazette · Glenn Battishill
December 30, 2023 · 12:00am
The upcoming new year will be one of improvement and reassessment for the City of Delaware Police Department, according to Police Chief Adam Moore.
Moore was appointed to the position in September 2022 and said his first full year as chief has been “long days and short years.” “You don’t realize how fast the clock moves until you’re in a position where you have a lot of great ideas and you want to enact those and you go, ‘Oh my gosh, 2023 is over. 2024 is here,'” Moore said. “It’s gone by fast. Maybe it’s because I’m doing what I love.”
Moore said his first year in the position has been “a learning process,” and he doesn’t expect to ever stop learning on the job.
“I continue to learn new things from my colleagues and experiences,” Moore said. “You really don’t grasp the scope of being chief of police until you sit down in that chair. It’s been fun learning all the ways that the department is connected to the community and the city. … I get to see everything, the whole landscape of what the police department is involved in.”
Looking ahead to the new year, Moore said the police department will be making a number of changes based on feedback it has received from the Center for Public Safety Management, which did a comprehensive review of the department this year.
Moore said the center reported that the department “provides extremely high level of customer service” and noted “few departments provide (this) level of one-on-one contact with citizens.”
“We provide a lot of face-to-face service,” Moore said. “The challenge for us is to continue to provide that extremely high level of service to residents and maintain our ability to do that (as the city grows).”
Moore said the center made 30 specific recommendations in its 132-page report, and the department has already made some changes and will make more in the new year based on that feedback.
For example, Moore said the police department is restructuring its command staff, looking at how it schedules staff, and looking into supporting the ability for residents to file police reports online.
Moore said a major accomplishment of 2023 was streamlining the hiring process at the department without lowering standards. He said the department is aiming to hiring eight officers in 2024, including four new positions, and the department has to find talented people interested in becoming police officers.
Moore said there was a general uptick in police reports filed in 2023, and the most common reports were theft, mental health crises, domestic incidents and disorderly conduct.
“We’re still dealing with remnants of COVID,” Moore said. “There are people at home in Delaware during the day that 10 years ago would be somewhere else. Those shifting patterns affect us.”
Moore said the department also took more sex offense reports in 2023 than in 2022, but instead of more physical incidents, many reports are referrals from other agencies or internet providers about individuals exchanging, selling or trafficking child pornography.
“(Those reports) are becoming more and more of our work,” he said.
Moore said the department has also seen more and more harassment/threat reports about messages exchanged online.
“We have everything they have in other cities but on a smaller scale,” he said. “Crime is regional. There’s no force field between us and Columbus or Marion or wherever.”
Moore said the job of the department can be “a different challenge every day,” and the department will start the new year with reflection and improvement.
“When the new year rolls around, there’s a little bit of the beginning of the new year reset where we reflect on what we’ve done in the last year,” he said. “It’s an opportunity for us to say, ‘What have we done well? What could we be doing better?'”
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