On Monday, January 27, the City of Pampa held their bi-monthly commissioners meeting, beginning with the ESU Annual Report presented by Emergency Management Coordinator, Troy Schweigerath.
“Our volunteers have continued to work hard to service our local departments and citizens of Gray County in the City of Pampa,” he said. “Our director and assistant director attended a CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) academy in Amarillo last year and plans to attend the academy and become certified CERT trainers this year.”
“Over the past year, our ESU division has allowed approximately 475 hours of service in funeral escorts, traffic control for parades, structure fires and vehicle collisions, and Recreation Park events such as the 4th of July Celebration and the Celebration of Lights in December. ESU also assisted in the multi-agency evacuation in Pampa during the Smokehouse Creek fire in early March. As much as we love to see those hourly numbers lower year after year, we’re thankful for the opportunity to continue our community and first responders in their times of need. They’re also our storm spotters so I rely heavily on them. Thank you again for your continued support and efforts to help our community.”
Next was the Annual Police Report by Chief of Police, Lance Richburg.
“For 2024, there was a total of 4,543 traffic stops made. Almost 60% of those were white, 4.58% were African American, and 34.5% were Hispanic or Latino,” he said, referring to the Racial Profiling portion of the report. “When we get into the gender of those stops, 39% were women and just over 60% were men.”
“305 of those stops were as a result of a violation of law other than traffic, 3,178 of those were moving traffic violations such as speeding or maintaining a single lane or running a red light or stop sign. Traffic violations could be a busted taillight or a expired registration sticker or something that is non-moving.”
“The number of vehicles where a search was conducted during these stops of the 4,543, over 4,200 did not result in a search of the vehicle. There were 316 searches. 156 of those searches were by consent, four of those that had contraband in plain view where an officer could see it and there were 84 based on probable cause. Out of those 316 searches, there were 160 where contraband was discovered, 156 with no contraband found. For the descriptions of the contraband found, 116 of those were narcotics, 37 were alcohol related and five of those had weapons found.”
“As a result of the stop, verbal warnings were zero. The reason we do not give verbal warnings is because written warnings help us gather the data needed to have a thorough report when it comes to the racial profiling. There were 2,659 written warnings and 1,750 citations. There were 36 instances where a warning was written and an arrest was made. There were 98 instances where a citation was issued and an arrest was made. 78 of those were based on penal code violations, 14 were on traffic law violations, one city ordinance where an arrest was made, and there were 41 arrests made for outstanding warrants. Out of those 4,542, no physical force was used whatsoever. We did have one registered use of force on a traffic stop where bodily injury was sustained by the suspect and that had to do with the officer involved shooting we had last spring.”
“The numbers we really look at are the demographics and how we respond to whether it’s an arrest, citation or warning-are they staying within those margins and they are. I’m very proud of the officers for doing that. It says a lot about how they approach their work.”
“This past year we had seven pursuits which is up one from last year, however two of those pursuits we had not initiated, which happens when another law enforcement agency such as DPS, or a sheriff’s office or other law enforcement agency asks for assistance. On the accident and injury analysis, we had one additional motor vehicle for a total of three this year. We had two instances where an officer backed into an object and one incident where the other person was at fault. For personal injury, we also had one additional injury from last year. We had one where an officer fell, another one where he was involved in an altercation with a suspect, and then we had one that was bitten by a dog.”
“Our total number of arrests went from 704 last year to 780 for 2024. Total reports generated went up about 100 more and our vehicle crashes went down by one which is still well below our 10-year average. Traffic has increased in Pampa, so for our vehicle accidents to have gone down at all is a very positive sign to see. Calls for service dropped this year from 17,500 to 16,255. We noticed a drop in calls around September to the end of the year and hopefully that’s a trend we can maintain. Our warnings went up substantially and our citations went down quite a bit.”
“The patrol division that is headed by Lt. Moses Campa who has done a great job his first year and I’m very proud of the work he’s done, the calls answered went down from 16,827 to 15,391 which is a pretty noticable reduction that we are okay with. Arrests made were 746 up from 633 last year. They investigated about 15 more motor vehicle crashes just in the patrol division. Citations and warnings were up at 327.”
“The only thing concerning in this report is our response time moved in the wrong direction. We’ve already looked into that and some of it were data entry issues. We figure it’s a factor of that and that coupled with being a little shorthanded throughout most of the year. That is something that is on our radar and Lt. Campa and his sargeants are looking at ways to mitigate response time.”
“Our traffic unit is currently headed by Chief Kenneth Hopson. This year they investigated 53 traffic accidents and wrote a total of 688 citations and warnings for various offenses. There were almost 20 fewer motor vehicle crashes they investigated.”
“The criminal investigations unit is headed by Stephanie Willoughby with two detectives that work under her. They investigated a total of 1,706 reports that was up from last year’s at 1,695. Of those reports, 963 of them have a disposition status of closed, cleared by arrest or citation. In addition, 359 have a case disposition of unfounded. What that means is a report was taken solely for information or documentation purposes where no offense was alleged or occurred, or cases in which an offense was later proved to not have occurred, or it did not meet the appropriate elements of the reported crime. If you remove that unfounded report from the total cases investigated, they had a clearance rate of a little of 71% which is outstanding.”
“Our communications division is fully staffed. Jessica Skinner is our supervisor over dispatch and she has done an outstanding job and has put together a great staff that have really caught on well and do a fantastic job. They answered a total of 14,457 911 calls, 4,500 of those were emergency calls, 3,152 were not and 6,800 of them were repeat calls. That is up just a hair from last year but far below what it was a couple of years ago. Pampa PD has almost 50% of the calls, sheriff’s office had a little over 6,000 calls, EMS 4,635 calls, animal services had 2,517 calls, and the fire department had 2,344 calls and there were various other agencies.”
“Our administrative support division is headed by Lt. Massey who is over police records, the property and evidence room, the mobile forensics laboratory which is a program that our District Attorney has helped fund where we can forensically download and extract evidence from electronic devices and we’ve done that several times, our drone unit, management over our Texas police chief’s best practices and accreditation program, grant programs and also coordinates with our city IT department. He does a great job for us. This division is also over our Top of Texas Crime Stoppers which incorporates three different counties. The biggest and most important to me is that he oversees our training and education. In the year 2024, officers and telecommunicators of the department attended and completed 362 training courses for a total of 4,272 in-service training hours. We’ve hosted a lot of schools and had people come from several different states across the nation to come to little Pampa, Texas for training. We’re very blessed that we have 13 officers who are certified instructors on staff. During the 2024 calendar year, the training division instructed 27 courses, 173 students and 802 total course hours.”
“Crimes decreased by 25 for 2024 which is an all-time low. While we are proud to give you those stats, I don’t want you to think we are the reason for that. We are in cooperation with our school district, churches and the community as a whole.”
Next items on the agenda were to approve the minutes of the January 13 meeting, excusing the absence of Mayor DeFever, and approving the list of disbursements dated December 2024; all were approved.
Next was to consider the adoption of the second and final reading of Resolution No. R25-002, approving the economic development project between the Pampa Economic Development Corporation and The Zone Bowling Center, which was approved.
Next was to consider awarding a bid in the amount of $156,316.40 to MEGA LED Technologies for the Electronic Billboard Project to replace the billboard at MK Brown, which was approved.
Next was to consider approving the two-year Animal Service Agreements with the following cities: Clarendon, Groom, Howardwick, Lefors, McLean, Miami, and Skellytown, which was approved.
The final item was to consider approving the 2025-2030 Long Range Plan of the Lovett Memorial Library as required by Texas Adminstrative Code Title 13, Rule 1.83, which was approved.
The meeting was then adjourned.