Paul Szmal: And welcome back to FLX Morning on Finger Lakes News Radio, it's 8.15. Joining us via Zoom right now is the Auburn City Police Chief, M. Matthew Androsco. Matt, good morning. It is a pleasure to have you on here, first time we're having you on the program.
Matthew Androsko: Good morning, how are you?
Paul Szmal: Doing very well, sir. How about yourself?
Matthew Androsko: Very good. The weather change is great, you know, get rid of the snow and rainbow on the way in, so clearly we're heading in the right direction.
Paul Szmal: Well there you go, you saw the rainbow because you were talking to us, that's a good sign, right?
Matthew Androsko: Perfect, perfect.
Paul Szmal: Let's go ahead and start things off if we can, Chief Matt, by talking about kind of a state of where the department is right now and where it's going.
Matthew Androsko: So right now, we are still short, so we're working on recruitment that's going relatively well. We have a test given in the fall again. We've almost exhausted our list here at the police department in regards to entry exam. Moving forward, we have been doing different types of trainings for our police department. We just finished principal policing for the whole entire police department in the month of March. This month we have range, and coming up in the fall and during the winter months, we're hoping to get completely trained here at the police department in evidence-based style policing by DCGS. We use evidence-based policing right now in a couple of our grants. The grants are STRIVE, which is the Statewide Reduction in Intimate Partner Violence, which is a domestic violence grant, and then our GIVE grant, which is Gun Involved Violence Elimination, which is our violent crime grant. So we see that the state has a trend of evidence-based policing, and us as a police department have been seeing the benefits from it of the reduction in crime in certain areas of the hotspot policing and also assisting us in getting some focused deterrence in some of the really bad individuals off the streets.
Paul Szmal: Can you explain for us, Chief, what the concept of evidence-based policing is all about?
Matthew Androsko: So breaking it down, it's pretty much following the numbers. So it's more analytics. So if we're busy on, let's say a Tuesday at four o'clock to six o'clock, we know enough that make sure we got enough staff at those hours and deploy them in a certain area because it will also show us on mapping of where to deploy them, so a certain area of the city. So we'll call that a hotspot. We have, with GIVE, we have different hotspot locations inside the city, so we deploy and do different tactics of sending those individuals to that area. They've been trained. The individuals on GIVE are ready in regards to this, so they know how to conduct themselves in these hotspot locations when we have those. So overall, it's pretty much analytics, and we've been pretty much doing it our entire careers. We just never knew what it was called. It was always kind of that gut feeling of, hey, you know what, we've been going in this area a lot for maybe their shots fired or even traffic. We go down Grand Avalanche, got traffic, so we'll enforce it more subconsciously without even knowing it. Well, now we actually have the scientific data to back it up and assist us moving forward.
Paul Szmal: And speaking of that scientific data, you're actually looking to hire a data analyst for the department.
Matthew Androsko: Yes, we are. So we've been actively pursuing that. So if anybody has a resume and education for it and hopefully a little bit of a past history of doing it, please apply to us because it's still open. We're trying to get that filled. It's a vital part of the police department moving forward and a vital part of our plan moving forward. And the pay's competitive to the other ones in Onondaga County, so we're trying to make sure that we're on par with everybody else.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with the City of Auburn Police Chief Matthew Androsco here on FLX Morning. Chief, could you give me the pluses and the minuses of where the department is right now?
Matthew Androsko: Pluses, we are young, so we're still mobile, but that's also a minus too because they don't have the experience. But obviously with time, experience comes and they are moving together as a cohesive unit, the whole entire patrol division. The other day I looked at it, out of the 44 patrol members, we have 32 of them been hired since 2019. About 75% of our patrol division has five years or less. That's pretty young for a police department. Also with us being short, we're short four on paper. However, we just hired five and they don't count for manpower for an entire year. So in reality, actually how it works in our numbers, we are short nine people at the moment.
Paul Szmal: Right, and that's because the people that you hire have to go through the academy and training programs, etc., etc.?
Matthew Androsko: Correct. They don't count for like a whole entire year once they've been hired. So we're still short almost, our shifts are usually between 12 and 14 people a shift, but we're almost short an entire shift.
Paul Szmal: Do you find that recruitment is one of the biggest challenges that the department is facing right now?
Matthew Androsko: It is a challenge and we're hoping to see the pendulum start swinging back the way it was when most of us upper command staff took the test. When we took the test, it was very competitive. We probably had between 300 and 400 people take the test when we took it here locally. And as of recently, I think the last time we gave the test, we saw about 60 people take. So that was an improvement from the previous time, which was about 40. So hopefully next time we can double look at the 120 and hopefully we keep going and get back up to that 300, 400 mark that was on average for most of us that took it way back years and decades ago.
Paul Szmal: I wanted to ask you to expand a little bit on each of the grants that you had talked about and these are again with evidence-based components in them. It's kind of going along with the new philosophy for the department. First is the statewide targeted reduction in intimate partner violence. What kind of grant program is this and how is this applied to the department?
Matthew Androsko: So this is a domestic violence grant. Myself and Captain Platt just attended the orientation last week in Albany. That was about three or four days. We team up with ourselves, the district attorney's office, the Kew County Sheriff's office, Kew County probation, CAP and the CAC. It's a joint effort. We work with each other in a high risk teams for trying to eliminate domestic violence and start zeroing in on offenders to either obviously arrest them or educate them. The whole purpose is for them to stop domestic violence. We hopefully will get the funding and that will assist us in possibly getting a detective here to assist our department along with funding for overtime for the details that we would be doing.
Paul Szmal: All right. And then the other grant is the gun-involved violence elimination grant. Can you go ahead and break that one down for us?
Matthew Androsko: So let's give, we are considered a tier two inside the state. Other ones would be like Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, it's more of the bigger cities that have shootings almost every day. Ours is more violent crime. So the state lets us lump in not just shootings, but assaults and stabbings and stuff like that. Fortunately, we fell into that where we fell into that purview of other cities that we had enough violent crime to get approved for this. However, with us getting this grant, it has worked tremendously and has driven us in directions that we weren't even aware of, like this Evans Space policing. It's assisted us of getting some really bad people off the streets. It's assisted us of being more there with community. Once a month, we meet with Booker T. Washington at the afterschool program and the police officers play basketball or kickball with the kids or whatever. And next month, we actually have a two-day event that we've teamed up with Auburn Housing and also the District Attorney's Office. We have purchased TVs and a couple, and a PlayStation 5 to play video games with kids and supply lunch for them those days.
Paul Szmal: Nice. Very nice. I have a question for this morning, Chief. Where do you see the department one year from today?
Matthew Androsko: One year from today, the goal is to have us all trained on Evans Space policing. Goals have strive up and running, have give, continue, do what it's been doing. Hopefully, our recruitment's there and we've had enough people that we at least have hired the amount of people that we need. And within 18 months, that should relatively put us right back up to fully staffed. That's the goal.
Paul Szmal: All right. Chief, we appreciate you being on board with us here this morning. Thanks for joining us and let's do it again sometime.
Matthew Androsko: You too. Thank you. Have a nice day.
Paul Szmal: All right. That is Auburn Police Chief Matt Androsco joining us here on FLX Morning. It is 825.
