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The Pleasanton Police Department presented its first bi-annual report of 2024 to the City Council earlier this month and updated the council on last year’s longer response times, crime trends and personnel challenges.
The May 7 meeting was also the first chance for Pleasanton’s newly installed Interim Police Chief Gina Anderson to be able to weigh in on these topics and offer different perspectives on issues like the department’s longer response time to both emergency and non-emergency calls.
“As I look at the response time information that is captured in this report, we have (data from) 2021, 2022, 2023, I would be really interested personally as the incoming police chief to take a look at what those response times looked like back in 2019 before the pandemic,” Anderson said during the meeting. “I’m wondering if we’re seeing this uptick not in part because of staffing but also because we just didn’t see as many people out on the roadways and so our officers were able to respond faster around town for that reason and it could be that simple.”
According to Capt. Kurt Schlehuber’s presentation to the council, PPD’s average response time for emergency calls in 2023 was five minutes and 19 seconds and nearly 25 minutes for non-emergency calls.
The city’s General Plan goals for those response times is four minutes for emergencies and 20 minutes for non-emergencies.
Schlehuber said in 2022, PPD’s average response time for emergency calls was four minutes and 40 seconds — that same year officers responded to non-emergency calls in 22 minutes and 49 seconds. In 2021, PPD’s response time was quicker by four seconds for emergency calls and by over a minute for non-emergency calls.
According to Schlehuber, the reason for the uptick in response times has been because of PPD’s officers being assigned to beat areas throughout the city.
“We have a five-beat system in Pleasanton and we have one officer per beat,” he said.
He said the reason for that is because officers can get to know that specific area better and can get to know the residents who live in their beats so that when they get calls for service they, as the primary responders to their assigned beats, already have relationships with those people who might be calling.
But with that system came some issues.
“One of the unintended consequences of that is that we were waiting to dispatch calls until that beat officer was available when there were available units maybe in just the neighboring beat,” Schlehuber said.
After realizing that was affecting response times, Schlehuber said the department made a change so that it dispatches the closest available unit regardless of whether or not that officer is assigned to the beat.
Anderson also jumped in near the end of the discussion to say that maybe it is also time to change the city’s General Plan response time goals.
“The General Plan’s four-minute target to emergency calls for service and the 20-minute goal for the non-emergency calls for service; I’m not sure at this point what drove those to be our goals,” Anderson said during the meeting. “If these were our goals — let’s say for example the General Plan is 10, 15, 20 years old — we just might have more residents in our community, more people on the roadways.”
Mayor Karla Brown confirmed that plan was implemented in 2005 as part of the 2005 to 2025 General Plan and that there was some validity in the fact that the response times are based on old data, but she also said she wasn’t necessarily saying to change the goals, which is something that Councilmember Jack Balch didn’t take lightly.
Balch said he understood what Anderson and Schlehuber were talking about with how long it sometimes takes to clear incidents due to how much data officers have to take down while responding to an incident and how PPD has to make sure officers respond to new calls not just as quickly as they can, but as safely as they can as well.
But he also said he still wants to make sure the city is appropriately responding to these calls as quickly as possible because every second matters to residents who are experiencing an emergency. He also said he doesn’t want the city to use metrics such as PPD responding quicker than other cities in the Bay Area.
“I want to measure against Pleasanton. I don’t want to measure against Oakland,” Balch said. “Moving the goal post, I can understand that, but I want to be very careful before we do that.”
Apart from response time data, Schlehuber went over important crime data that shows how the city experienced what he called an anomaly of three homicides in 2023. He specifically called out the murder of 26-year-old Blake Mohs who was shot and killed at a Home Depot in April 2023 and how brazen some criminals are becoming.
“We hope that this isn’t a continuing trend,” he said.
Other crime trends he pointed out included more reported rapes last year because more people are coming forward to speak out on past incidents; an increase of juvenile arrests last year primarily due to shoplifting at the Stoneridge Shopping Center; an increase in residential burglaries and auto theft, which has been a regionwide trend; and a downward trend in catalytic converter thefts which is an improvement from past years.
He also touched on how there were less traffic enforcement stops, primarily due to the collapse of the department’s traffic unit last year. Not having that additional unit out patrolling was another reason why the response times were higher, Schlehuber said, because they didn’t have those additional officers available to respond to calls.
One other increase Schlehuber went over from last year was in control holds, which are not equivalent to choke holds as choke holds are against PPD procedures.
He said that PPD has been seeing suspects being more defiant when getting arrested, which has led to that increase in control holds.
Schlehuber also went over how the department’s Alternate Response Unit has been seeing great results by diverting 362 mental health calls away from patrol officers and said the unit recently partnered with the school resource officer program because they see a lot of mental health hold calls coming from schools.
He finally touched on personnel matters, which has been a big issue for the department over the past year. He said they have five new officers in the training program and five in the police academy with one already having graduated on May 13, which means more officers coming through the pipeline.
Schlehuber said that’s not just important for the community, but also for boosting officer morale by giving them more opportunities to take days off and not having to work overtime.
While the rest of the council had mostly praised the work the PPD has done with the report and noted all of the positive work they have been doing, the only public speaker for the item — Pleasanton resident John Bauer — said there should be more external oversight for these types of reports.
Bauer is the father of Jacob Bauer, who died in police custody in 2018. He said while he has seen the department get better over the years, he still believes there was no accountability for his son’s death — even after he and his wife settled their lawsuit against the city in 2021 — and that reports like the PPD made earlier this month should be done outside of the department.
“One topic that has not been addressed since that time has been external independent oversight,” Bauer said. “It was put forward by the previous council that the PPD currently does have oversight and that is with you, the City Council, and that this bi-annual report is part of that oversight.”
“Does anybody in this room really think that there was oversight in this presentation?” Bauer added.
