MONTE VISTA - At the last Monte Vista City Council meeting Sergeant Eugene Ortega and Sergeant Michael Martinez updated the council on how the force has been doing these last few months. All of their regular community outreach programs like coffee with a cop, neighborhood watch, etc. have been canceled since March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They are hopeful if they get the appropriate guidelines that they can begin such meetings again in the next couple of months.
Normally this time of year the force would be busy preparing for Stampede. “Everybody knows Stampede is canceled. This would be a big time for us now to be planning and getting ready on our end,” said Sergeant Ortega adding, “I think a lot of guys are sad that we’re not going to have Stampede. National Night out was postponed from August due to the pandemic until possibly in September or October. As soon as we have an official date and time we’ll be putting that out to everybody.”
Sergeant Ortega went on to share some statics the department had over the last few months sharing that the pandemic affected their numbers. “Just for comparison, March we had 790 calls for service and 38 arrests. In April it dropped down to 623 calls for service with 21 arrests. We didn’t get May’s numbers from dispatch yet but for the month we had 42 arrests so it was starting to pick up a little bit toward the end of May when things were starting to open up. Our arrests for January and February before the pandemic and the lockdown averaged 53 arrests and for comparison for last year we had 48 for March through April. Our numbers fluctuated because of the pandemic and how we were responding to calls and being in contact with people and things like that,” shared Sergeant Ortega adding, “One thing that I will note is that our burglaries and our trespasses for March through the end of May 2019, we had 6 burglaries, 6 trespasses, in that amount of time. For a total of 12 reports. This year for March to May 2020 we have 15 burglaries and 7 trespasses. So I definitely think the pandemic and people losing jobs and things like that affected our stats.”
Sergeant Martinez went on to share how the force operated during the last few months saying, “We maintained our presence. We did a lot of foot patrol down the business district and we do a lot of vehicle patrol at nighttime as requested. What we still maintained is our emergency response. Every emergency call we received we responded to. What we altered was non-emergent things. Our cold calls, requests for call backs and things like that. If we didn’t necessarily need to respond in person we did not. We took care of it by phone.” Sergeant Martinez also shared that they were able to have people email them statements in some cases. When the officers did respond in person Martinez shared that they were equipped with masks and gloves. They also felt very grateful to the community for supplying them with homemade masks, “We had an overwhelming ability to get masks. Community members they made us masks. We had gloves and things like that. Our officers were definitely thinking about things like safety first. Fortunately we didn’t have a loss of any officer to sickness related to COVID,” said Sergeant Martinez.
New police officer Jonathan Moreno is sworn in by Monte Vista Police Chief George Dingfelder.
Officer David Pino receives recognition for his five years of service in the Monte Vista Police Department.
Irene Arellano receives a plaque in recognition of her 35 years serving the City of Monte Vista.
Diana Smith receives a certificate recognizing her one year of service to the City of Monte Vista in its finance department
