The Amherst Police Department is committed to providing the citizens we serve with continuously improving police service.   In October of 2004 we again attained Accreditation from the Massachusetts Police Accreditation Commission, Inc when an assessment team confirmed that the Amherst Police Department met the Commission’s state-of-the-art standards.  Accreditation is a highly prized recognition of law enforcement professional excellence.    In 2000, the Amherst Police Department became the 2^nd police department in the Commonwealth to be awarded accreditation status, and I am very pleased that we’ve continued with the high standards that we have set for ourselves.  We will continue to build upon our professional reputation through training and technology. 

During this last year we have worked very hard towards protecting the community and playing our part in assuring that the quality of life for our citizenship only improves.  We don’t merely respond to the calls for service and quality of life complaints within this town, but we are constantly asking ourselves; how can we do better?  We welcome the feedback that we receive from the community and encourage you to continue to help us improve our services to the town.  In an effort to be more assessable to the community we’ve re-designed our webpage to offer more online services and police related information to the public.  We are very proud of our website, so if you haven’t done so, please visit our site at www.amherstpd.org.

The staffing of the Department modified to address the changing needs of the community.   The detective bureau now has an investigator working on our evening shift and every weekend, where it had traditionally only been staffed during the dayshift.  We have found that the clearance rate in the investigation of crimes have improved as a result of this change.    We have also re-assigned more personnel to the 7PM to 3AM shift, where we have found that a larger portion of our calls are service related, such as noise complaints, traffic problems, and non-violent family disputes.  The dayshift is now staffed with an officer who specializes in motorcycle patrol and traffic enforcement as we’ve identified that our motor vehicle crashes are the most time consuming activity during the dayshift.   Education and enforcement of the motor vehicle laws is an important step towards reducing traffic related injuries.  While our calls for service increased from fiscal 2004 to fiscal 2005, our reports of crimes and total arrests decreased substantially, with the largest decreases being in liquor law offenses.  We feel that our persistent enforcement of the drunk driving and open container laws have been paying off.  

We continue to be dedicated to the principles of community policing and progressive policing in our delivery of service to the Town of Amherst.   We value our integrative partnerships with the many private and public groups in the community where we jointly address the problems and concerns within the Town.    Despite budget restrictions through our community, we are pleased that the Town of Amherst has worked with us to keep our funding at a level where our services to the community are not adversely affected.  I’m a firm believer that the greatest asset of the Police Department is the personnel, both the sworn officers and civilian staff.  The civilian staff, patrol officers and command staff of your police department recognize that in tight fiscal times it is necessary to be creative in ways to decrease expenses, without decreasing our services.   During the last fiscal year we were successful in receiving state and federal grants that allowed us to provide the services that you’ve been accustomed to.  State grants provided funding for many community policing and motor vehicle enforcement programs and federal grants provided funding to enhance our information technology systems.   We will continue to aggressively pursue grant opportunities to weather through these difficult fiscal times.   

Charles L. Scherpa

Chief of Police