Covington Police Chief Brian Valenti presented the department’s strategic plan for 2024 through 2028 at the meeting of the board of commissioners Tuesday night and engaged in discussion with commissioners about possibly adding a social worker to the police force.
The police strategic plan is not an official piece of legislation or city action but rather something that coincides with the department’s accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, an independent credentialing authority founded in the 1970s. The last Covington strategic plan was adopted in 2017, and Valenti said that new strategic plans tend to be adopted every four to five years.
Covington PD is currently staffed with 111 out of the force’s 114 police officer positions, in addition to 26 civilian support staff positions. Although the force holds jurisdiction over all of Kenton County and Newport, the latter of which is enabled through an inter-local agreement, they naturally spend most of their time working in Covington.
The strategic plan lays out several key goals for the department in the coming years. Notable objectives include the following:
- Separating and expanding the Community Liaison Unit, which is currently administered through the department’s patrol unit. Community liaisons are officers whose job is interact with the community in public settings.
- Create a community liaison sergeant position
- Add more license-plate reading camera systems to key access points throughout the city
- Train all investigators in sexual assault investigations by 2028
- Re-establish street corner unit, an undercover unit that will likely be spun out from police assigned to the Housing Authority of Covington
- Generally, improve recruiting efforts; the NKY region has struggled to recruit police officers in recent years
- Add lateral, moving target equipment to the department’s firing range
- Repair or replace aging equipment:
- Replace the firing range’s ranges climate control system, which is old and for which replacement parts are unavailable
- Resurface the employee parking lot
- Repair damaged fencing around the employee parking lot
- Replace the faulty gate to the employee parking lot, which currently leaves the cars therein unsecured
- Resurface the evidence parking lot
- Repair the gate to the evidence parking lot
Violent crime has been trending downward in Covington since 2019, according to FBI crime statistics. Although violence does occur, the threat of out-of-control criminal violence is not something that has characterized police work in Covington.
Covington Police Captain Joshua Bornhorn stated this outright at a community forum in Latonia in February.
“It’s not like in the movies where people drive around, and they just like start shooting the place up,” Bornhorn said in February. “There’s not bands of criminals running around looking to murder people.”
Overall, the text of the strategic plan as well as Valenti's statements indicated the department "aspires to be a model community-oriented police agency," which is a roundabout way of saying the police hoped to forge relationships with both normal residents and other institutions in Covington.
Valenti emphasized what he referred to as intelligence-based policing in his presentation, which entailed both the usage of technology as well as information volunteered from residents in the community.
"So what we're trying to do is when we look at different points of data, try to put our manpower in places that [gives] us the biggest bang for our buck per se," Valentia said.
As an illustration, he pointed to the city's crime mapping technology, which shows where reported crime has occurred in the city.
Discussion between Valenti and commissioners after his presentation focused on the possibility of hiring a police social worker. Valenti said that it would aid in helping people who have repeatedly been in contact with the police get help at other institutions and agencies in the region, whether for mental health, addiction or other services not readily available with the police. The social worker would not accompany officers on calls but would, instead, follow up after the fact.
Police departments in Erlanger, Alexandria and Fort Thomas, for instance, already have dedicated police social workers.
Mayor Joe Meyer had questions about how much these proposals could cost, especially as it related to the possibility of more technology purchases.
"There are some budgetary elements in here that could be severe," Meyer said.
The police department is second only to the fire department in terms of expenditures. The department draws its operating budget from the tax-funded city general fund, which is still in the throes of a deficit, in spite of recent improvements in the city's overall position. The police department incurred about $18.4 million in expenditures last fiscal year. The current fiscal year, which ends June 30, has budgeted about $20 million for the police department. The commissioners must approve the city's new budget before July 1.
LINK nky asked Valenti after meeting to expound upon some of the requests made during the presentation.
"[The Mayor's] not wrong in the fact that technology costs money," Valenti said. "The way it stands our field continues to get more and more towards the technology side."
He said this was true not only for enforcement technologies like license plate-reading cameras but also for more mundane tasks like record-keeping and communication.
As it related to the police social worker, Valenti said the department would likely seek grant funding or partnership with the Life Learning Center to offset the expense.
Although commission members seemed to be in support of many of the proposed measures, no official action on any of the discrete requests occurred at the meeting.
Read a full text of the strategic plan here.
The next meeting of the Covington City Board of Commissioners will take place on Tuesday, June 4 at 6 p.m. at Covington City Hall on Pike Street.
