Georgetown Police Chief Wayne Nero said he is constantly looking for ways to keep the city’s crime rate low as its population increases.

“Georgetown is Georgetown; we have our own identity and personality. We’re safe, [but] we know growth is coming. It’s already here, but we want to be careful about how we manage that growth so we don’t lose that [identity and safety],” Nero said. “My goal is to keep us safe, and my challenge will be keeping the same level of quality service delivery while maintaining a low crime rate as we grow.”

In May, Nero presented a patrol staffing study that identified Georgetown Police Department patrol officers’ workloads and included a strategic plan for staffing patrol units in the future.

Nero said the study will be used to determine how patrol officer workloads and quality of service to residents could be affected by population growth. In May, the city was named the fastest-growing city in the U.S. among cities with populations of 50,000 or more, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Nero said the department is adequately staffed; however, as the city grows the needs may change, so he said he wants to begin staffing discussions now to prepare for the future.

The department has 80 sworn officers, or about 1.25 officers per 1,000 residents. The national average is between 1.7 and 1.8 officers per 1,000 residents, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Nero said police-to-population ratios are used to show national staffing trends and are not a basis for staffing decisions.

“Crime rates haven’t gone up, but [our] workload has,” he said. “The point of the study is to make sure we’re capturing accurately what we are doing so we can compare year to year what’s changing, [figure out why] it’s changing, and if it’s good or bad. … We have [officers] who are dedicated to serving this community.”

Of GPD’s 80 officers, 44 are assigned to patrol duty.

Staffing study

In April the department contracted with the University of North Texas to develop a five-year strategic patrol-staffing plan, which includes updated information collected in 2015.

The staffing plan, developed by Eric Fritsch, chairman of the department of criminal justice at UNT, was based on data collected from GPD and included workload and performance assessments for patrol staff, Fritsch said.

Fritsch used the data to help determine the number of officers that could be needed based on increasing demand for service and decreasing response times.

“I get the most recent calendar-year data, and I build what is called a base model,” Fritsch said. “[Then] we look for how things are going to change over the next five years, and we build … a predictive model to say how many officers do you need in order to do blank.”

Nero said studying the staffing needs now will help him with future budget requests.

“I’m not really uncomfortable with the number [of staff] we have right now; however, we are going to continue to grow,” he said. “This is the second year we’ve done this study, and we want to update it every year so we have a good benchmark of our staffing needs. … Now it’s a matter of monitoring those benchmarks to make sure we are optimizing what we are doing.”

Staffing studies on other units of the department, including criminal investigations, could be done in the future.

Deployment unit

Nero said one example of City Council looking ahead to address the department’s growing needs was establishing a deployment unit that launched in September.

The five-man team is able to separate from other responsibilities to solve issues such as drug-, traffic- or community-related issues, Nero said.

City Council approved the creation of the unit in the city’s fiscal year 2014-15 budget to help identify smaller issues in the city before they become major problems, Nero said.

GPD Capt. Evelyn McLean, who oversees the unit, said the team has already been addressing issues, including narcotics and burglaries.

“The team does a lot of proactive policing,” she said. “This deployment team is [helping] do things that traditional patrol can’t [because of their other duties].  … Hopefully [the unit] will handle things before they happen.”

Officer Andre Mason, a member of the deployment team, said as the city’s population grows and Georgetown becomes more connected to neighboring communities, the deployment team will be able to work with those surrounding law-enforcement agencies to address issues as they arise.

“As we grow, we are becoming more linked with other cities,” he said. “In the past we were small enough that we were kind of secluded, but that’s not the case any more.”

Mason said the unit also has the capability to team up with other department units as well as serve as a community resource.

“The idea is to be just as much a community-oriented unit,” he said. “It’s not a matter of just stopping crime but making the community better as a whole.”

The deployment team could also help launch other units, such as a lake or park patrol, Nero said.

“As we grow, we want to be paying attention,” he said. “As we grow the police department will have to grow, and how we will do that will largely be a policy decision [from City Council].”