A new Monroe County Sheriff's Office facility for coordinating multijurisdictional investigations using real-time intelligence is now up and running.
The Regional Investigative Operations Center in Greece has a staff of 25 full-time employees, including sworn deputies and civilians. It will serve all police agencies in Monroe County and has space for representatives from each of those organizations to be present.
"It's always been a team effort in Monroe County, but there hasn't been one spot for us to play team sports together," Sheriff Todd Baxter said during a ceremonial ribbon-cutting Thursday. "This brings us together for those operations. Through this, we're merging cutting edge technology and strong relationships and combining them together."
The RIOC is essentially a permanent command post. It is outfitted with large video screens on the walls that can display information from all sorts of sources — whether it's a map of active incidents, automated license plate reader hits, live video from drones, police body cameras, patrol car dash cams, and traffic cameras, or weather maps. It's also equipped with computers and large printers for mapmaking.
The Sheriff's Office first proposed the RIOC in 2023 as a way to handle investigations that cross municipal lines, such as missing persons, catalytic converter thefts, the rash of Kia and Hyundai thefts, child abductions or violent extremism. It is also designed to be used for critical incidents, weather-related emergencies, monitoring crowds, and more.
"As public safety progresses into the 21st Century, we're recognizing the need to integrate technology to increase speed of investigations, to improve first responder safety and ultimately to better serve the public," said Sheriff's Office Lt. Christopher Reynolds, RIOC's command officer.
The RIOC has an operating budget of $4.2 million under County Executive Adam Bello's 2026 budget proposal, which the County Legislature will vote on later this month. Of that allocation, $3.8 million would be for personnel costs.
The facility cost $4.5 million to build and equip. Some of the cost was offset by state and federal grant money.
"The RIOC is Monroe County's commitment to giving the men and women of our local law enforcement agencies who work so hard, often with limited tools and growing demands, the resources and support that they need to do their job safely and to do it effectively," said Monroe County Executive Adam Bello.
