The Reno Police Department reported over 72,000 calls for service in 2023, a record number according to the annual report the department released on Thursday.
Police Chief Kathryn Nance sat down with journalists to dive into the data and answer questions about safety in the Biggest Little City, following the report's release.
The following are her answers to questions posed by 2 News Nevada reporters, edited for brevity and grammar.
2 News Nevada Reporter: the Reno Police Department saw a record number of calls last year. What would you say to people who are concerned about safety?
Chief Kathryn Nance: The calls for service need to be taken in context of what they are. Some of those calls are people calling the police, and us needing to respond. And some of those are us responding to calls or us responding to areas to do proactive enforcement or traffic stops or even just area checks.
So our total calls for service, we use that as a metric to see how busy everyone is. How busy are the people that are responding to calls? How many calls are they going to on average per day? What do shifts look like when they’re responding to calls?
While it’s not always a crime that we’re dealing with when it’s a call for service, that increase does show that we’re increasing both our numbers of officers and our ability to be proactive and respond to incidents as they happen.
Taking the time to sit and chew on these numbers from last year, is there anything that stands out to you as ways in which Reno police need to improve?
We really have to do the proactive enforcement. When we worked through the DEEDS program, when we looked at the data from that, we really did see that as our proactivity – as our proactivity went up, calls for service and crimes went down. It’s pretty much common sense, but to do that, we have to be meticulous in how we deploy our resources, evaluate what areas those resources need to be in, and then take that information and apply it to each individual space in our community.
No two streets are alike, so you have to really understand what’s happening there so that we can deploy the best way we can.
We hear this often from viewers who have lived in Reno for 30 or 40 years. They’ve seen the city grow, and they’ve seen crime increase, and they take it as a sign that things are going downhill. What would you say to that viewer at home?
We have to look at the actual numbers, and there’s different ways to look at that data.
If you don’t feel safe in your community or you don’t feel safe in a neighborhood, it doesn’t matter if I tell you that the crime there is lower. It’s how you feel when you’re in that area.
That makes us say, how do we make people feel better about being in an area? Some of that is blight or the type of businesses there, and everyone has their own individual safety level.
What I would encourage people to do is the same thing I encourage people everywhere to do. Pay attention to your surroundings. Make decisions when you go out after dark or at night. Don’t go someplace by yourself if you don’t feel safe there. Bring somebody with you. Pay attention.
You hired about 25 officers last year – contextualize that number for us. How much has that grown the department? How does it help?
We are hiring a lot of people right now, and the good thing about that is we’re able to catch up with the attrition that we see. We have people that are retiring that have had 25- and 30-year careers in law enforcement, and they’re ready to retire, and we’re ready to bring in new people right behind them.
We’re trying to keep our percentage rate of vacancies down. We are continuously hiring and running two academies per year.
Another big undertaking last year – you updated your policies and procedures. How does that change what’s happening on the ground level?
The policy updates are really important because it allows us to modernize and be part of what is happening in policing right now. What is best practices in law enforcement? What are best practices in society?
One of the things that we changed was our grooming standards. So we were able to allow our officers to have beards if they want. If they are going to have longer hair, they have to secure it back in a bun.
We just changed a lot of things really to be more modern and to be cohesive with what is expected of our law enforcement.
We’re still continuing to do that. This next year, we’re going to see that every policy in the department is reviewed, overhauled, and looked at.
If I were pulled over in a traffic stop later this afternoon – would I notice anything different about that interaction because of the policy and procedure changes?
We want to make sure that people have a positive experience even if it’s a negative encounter. We still want you to walk away and say, that officer treated me with respect.
Part of that was the training we incorporated. Procedural justice was new this year. We’re moving onto implicit bias training. All of those things help our officers be more aware when they’re on the streets.
