Three Monroe County legislators are pressing the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office for more details on a proposed $7.3 million expansion of the law enforcement agency.
Democrats Rachel Barnhart, Susan Hughes-Smith, and Maria Vecchio each submitted a list of questions on different aspects of the plan, which would add 43 positions to the Sheriff’s Office and create a new Regional Investigative Operations Center (RIOC).
Barnhart’s questions focused on the RIOC, which she said was described in legislation and a one-hour briefing from Sheriff’s Office staff with inadequate detail about its staffing, budget, and purpose.
The legislation described the RIOC as a structure for coordinating efforts of law enforcement and public safety agencies and resources “to address a wide range of multijurisdictional crime patterns, such as smash-and-grab burglaries, catalytic converter thefts, child abductions, and violent extremist threats.”
“We all want law enforcement to be able to solve these crimes,” Barnhart said. “We all want to be able to keep our community safe. But when you’re asking for that kind of money for this Regional Investigative Operations Center, it really needs to be justified to make sure that we’re not duplicating existing effort.”
During an interview Thursday at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office PGA command post in Pittsford, Chief Deputy Michael Fowler said that the center will not duplicate existing work done by the state-run Monroe County Crime Analysis Center or the local Rochester Threat Advisory Committee, which assesses tips that someone may be planning an act of violence and helps develop plans to manage the situation.
The RIOC will have a physical location initially staffed by seven people, including sworn deputies and civilians, Fowler said. It will serve all police agencies in Monroe County and will help them share information and coordinate resources for large investigations involving more than one agency, such as ongoing investigations into smash-and-grab burglaries, the rash of Kia and Hyundai thefts, and catalytic converter thefts.
“What I'm really trying to describe to you is a large room with a command post setup,” Fowler said. “So video screens on the wall, large display screens, computers, large printers for mapmaking, all that sort of stuff, is the technology behind it. But the key is the personnel that work there, and what their purpose is.”
The center will also disseminate information and coordinate resources for responses to major emergencies. It will have enough space for representatives from every agency in the county to be present, Fowler said.
In their letters, Vecchio and Hughes-Smith raised a few questions about the RIOC, but focused their detailed inquiries largely on the need for additional staff. The proposal would add 41 deputy positions and two civilian positions.
Sheriff’s Office officials have said the department has been running at a bare minimum, which creates difficulty when deputies take sick time or other time off and leads to overtime. They’ve also said more staffing should free up time-pressed deputies to do more proactive work and to spend time in the communities they patrol.
Hughes-Smith said she wants more specific data justifying the magnitude of the staffing increase, such as comparisons with other county sheriff’s offices, call response times, the amount of overtime worked by deputies, future costs of adding the staff, and what “proactive details” will entail.
Legislators will begin discussing the proposal during Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting, on which Hughes-Smith and Vecchio serve.
The activist group Free the People Roc opposes the proposal.In a statement posted to Facebook, the group called it “an inadequate solution that fails to address the root causes of crime” and said that solutions to poverty will “unequivocally address the issues of crime in our community.” It has called on its supporters to attend Tuesday’s committee meeting and speak out against the measure.
“We must support community-led solutions which prioritize safety of residents,” the statement concluded. “We have continually called for our county to reimagine what public safety means. We need real solutions and continually they fail to listen.”
