MONTE VISTA – During the last Monte Vista City Council meeting, Monte Vista Police Chief George Dingfelder came before the council with a brief report about the department. “Our incidents continue to be down. About 100 incidents down from the same time last year and that’s kind of been the trend all year. I don’t know if it’s (because of) COVID,” said Chief Dingfelder. Dingfelder also shared that in August their calls for service were a bit higher saying, “We’re kind of creeping back up to where I guess normal would be up around 1,000. We were right at 900 incidents or calls for service (in August).”

Dingfelder shared that currently the department is working on an investigation and working together with the Alamosa Police department. “One of the things I really wanted to get established is working together as departments across the Valley, so we’ve been actively working with Alamosa and we’re starting to do that a lot more with other investigations too. Kind of combining resources. We’re both smaller departments although we’re two of the bigger departments in the Valley,” said Chief Dingfelder. Dingfelder also shared that working together in their investigations has been working well, and they are able to get more done and get it done faster.

During his report Dingfelder also shared that the department has been catching up on their training which had to be canceled earlier this year due to COVID. “We’ve got some good free local training that we brought in through a grant through the San Luis Valley Training Foundation, so we are taking advantage of that so we’re not having to send people out of the Valley. I got to tell you that the Training Foundation brings in some of the most top notch law enforcement training across this country.” Chief Dingfelder told the council that one of the trainings was taught by the retired Police Chief of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Dingfelder also shared with the council that next month they will start some proactive traffic and distracted driving enforcement. “We’re going to start using our overlap days to do some more targeted traffic enforcement and then some criminal activity enforcement,” said Dingfelder adding, “We’ll have a lot more officers on our overlap days and we will be able to instead of going from call to call to call. I have one to two officers that’s all they really do is end up doing reactive versus proactive. This will give us an opportunity to do some proactive traffic enforcement.”