Photo courtesy of the City of New Albany
When I began my law enforcement career here on patrol 28 years ago, our Village Council met in a converted chicken coop. New Albany was one square mile in size, with about 900 residents. There was no Business Park, and there were a total of two police officers.
Today, City Council no longer meets in a chicken coop. New Albany is 14.53 square miles, with the largest master-planned business park in Ohio. Our daytime population is well over 20,000, with a school student population of nearly 5,000, and we have a police staff of 30.
As much as we have changed and grown, however, our small-town value of looking out for one another remains. You check on your neighbors, act as additional eyes and ears throughout town, report things that look out of the ordinary, and I can’t emphasize this enough: You support and trust your officers. This is fundamental to our ability to protect and serve and something the men and women in our department don’t take for granted.
New Albany remains one of Ohio’s safest communities for all of these reasons, and we view our outreach programs as a key ingredient to developing and maintaining relationships. Some of you are participating in our 10-week Citizen Police Academy, which runs through April 5, to learn more about what it is like to be a police officer and the split-second decisions we make.
Photo courtesy of the City of New Albany
We are fixtures on the school learning campus throughout the academic year. The City of New Albany provides two police officers to our New Albany-Plain Local Schools at no cost, with one serving as the D.A.R.E. officer and the other serving as the school resource officer. Establishing good relationships with our students while they are young – either on campus or through Safety Town, our bike rodeo or other outreach efforts – is a big step in showing youngsters that officers are on their side. And when school is not in session, these two join our other officers in patrolling New Albany streets.
As safe as New Albany is, no community is immune to crime. To that end, earlier this year we had our first community-wide active shooter training, co-sponsored by American Electric Power and the New Albany Chamber of Commerce, to learn strategies and appropriate responses to survive an active shooter event.
To combat women’s violence issues, we offer self-defense classes to women 18 years of age or older at various times throughout the year. More than 1,000 women have participated in this program, which is a mixture of classroom and practical skills that include basic self-defense techniques, rape aggression defense and domestic violence awareness. We’ve even had mother and daughter teams take this class together.
Photo courtesy of the City of New Albany
A third program we provide, but hope our residents never have to use, is child ID cards. Our police staff will create a child ID badge for parents containing a photograph and fingerprint. These cards are useful should your child ever go missing. To inquire about having these cards made, call the police department at 614-855-1234 to set up an individual appointment or look for our child ID booth at the upcoming Founder’s Day Parade this May or Touch-a-Truck event this August.
If you operate a business in New Albany, you may be interested in our Crime Awareness for Business Program, in which businesses contact the police department to report suspicious activities and persons of interest with the intent of having police share this information with other businesses. For more information, email mham@newalbanypolice.org.
Whether you’re a resident or business, your police department is here to help, and we thank you for your willingness to do the same.
Greg Jones has been chief of the New Albany Police Department since 2013. Feedback welcome at adeperro@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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