Every year, Lansdale Police Department conducts a formal and representative survey of our residents to help guide us in understanding how the residents of our community feel their police department and the service they feel they are getting for their investment.
While the full report is coming out in March and will be shared at the Borough Council Business Meeting, the overwhelming response to the survey is that residents feel safe in our community. Over 88% of respondents said they felt “safe” or “very safe” in Lansdale in general, and more than 90% said they felt safe in their neighborhood.
Obviously, we want residents to feel safe and secure in our community, and I am proud to say that we are certainly accomplishing that goal. However, building a safe community is not enough. We must also help foster, improve, and support our community. Over 96% of respondents felt that it is important for the community and police to work together to solve community issues, and I am proud to say that we are going to continue to work in this manner with our community partners and our residents.
Over the last several years, we have embraced a community policing model that allows for officers to get to know and work closely with residents and business owners in the hopes of building a closer connection between our police department and everyone who calls Lansdale home. At our Annual LPD awards ceremony, we showcased some of the amazing stories and efforts of officers working closely with residents to improve our community. In my opinion, 96% of residents agreeing that community policing is important shows that our efforts are working, and that people value this type of positive interaction.
Additionally, we wanted to understand the perception of the people who we interacted with in a non-community-oriented fashion, meaning an officer had direct contact with someone due to a call for service, a traffic stop, or similar event. Over 96% of respondents who fell into this bucket said they were treated professionally, with dignity and respect. In today’s world, I cannot underscore how important it is for us to understand this metric. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. As your police department, we must continue to meet that expectation every single day and I am proud that we were able to meet that expectation for our community at such a high level.
Finally, we must also look for ways to improve and help the community grow. Many comments and suggestions were geared toward traffic management and speeding. I am happy to report that we are actively working toward a better solution to managing traffic. In the spring, Chief Trail and I will be announcing and deploying a traffic management unit that will be dedicated to solving some of these traffic related issues. This is the first step in a larger review of our traffic management and will help with some of the more immediate concerns around speeding and stop sign compliance. The addition of four new officers by the end of the year will greatly help in this endeavor and expand our ability to improve our traffic management across the borough.
While this survey is not the only way we review our performance, it does help us better understand the perspectives and needs of our residents. Our police department is here to serve our community and help it become better every year through the over 26,000 events that are responded to. As a friend of mine says, all feedback is a gift. We will continue to use the gift of feedback to grow, improve, and adjust as our community needs change over time.
We will continue to build upon our community policing efforts, we will continue to treat every person with dignity and respect, and we will continue to help make Lansdale a great place to call home.
(Mayoral Musings is a weekly op-ed column submitted to North Penn Now, courtesy of Lansdale Borough Mayor Garry Herbert. The views expressed are his own.)
See also:
Mayoral Musings: Preparing Lansdale for the Electric Vehicle Revolution
Mayoral Musings: 2023 Infrastructure
Mayoral Musings: Goals and Objectives for 2023
Mayoral Musings: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
