New Detroit Chief Aims To Boost Public Confidence As Crime Drops

Todd Bettison is starting as chief of the Detroit Police Department with an eye toward transparency. The veteran officer, former assistant chief and deputy mayor spent years building bridges with communities in Detroit and helping to craft the neighborhood-based violence intervention effort "ShotStopper." Bettison said those relationships remain at the forefront as he plans for the future of the department, reports BridgeDetoit. Bettison said he’s building off the work of his predecessor and working on several initiatives aimed at boosting community confidence in police services. Bettison’s priorities include overhauling policies and procedures, rolling out a new missing person alert system, improving communication with families of homicide and nonfatal shooting victims, adding personnel to close out cold cases and cracking down on gas stations that sell tobacco products to minors.  Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed Bettison after former chief James White stepped down to lead the Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network.

Bettison inherits a well-staffed department as crime in the city is trending down. Bettison is creating a Transformation Management Bureau to look at how we’re doing things, do research and come up with how to run the department better and benchmark it and create things that don’t exist so that others can look toward the department as a model. He worked with community groups called Detroit 300, New Era Detroit, and Force Detroit as assistant chief. Bettison set up ShotStoppers, creating a system of metrics in three to four square miles called “CVI Zones” He says, "It was all based on data. Those zones are historically the hot spots. We look back five years and look at homicides and non-fatal shootings, where people got shot and didn’t die, those were real hot spots."