January is a great time to establish goals for the coming year, to think about the things that are most important. At the Ukiah Police Department (UPD), our goal is simple: we want to make sure you are safe.
As you can imagine, those of us who work for the police department face countless challenges each day, but we never lose sight of our commitment to making Ukiah as safe as we can.
To help us reach that goal, we use a set of core values that our officers developed years ago. Our core values serve as a guidepost, reminding us what’s important and influencing our day-to-day decisions.
As we begin the new year, I thought this would be a great time to remind everyone of our core values.
You might wonder, “What exactly is a core value?”
In a Harvard Business Review essay, famous business consultant and bestselling author Jim Collins defined core values by saying, “Core values are the essential and enduring tenets of an organization. A small set of timeless guiding principles, core values require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the organization.”
Some people consider core values to be a company’s moral compass. Put another way, they are an organization’s most important beliefs.
For us here at UPD, our core values are Safety, Professionalism and Community Service, and we define them as follows:
Safety: We value human life and strive to enable our citizens to be safer and less likely victimized by crime.
Professionalism: We value dedicated, highly trained personnel with a commitment to the standards of the law enforcement profession.
Community Service: We value the privilege to provide effective, efficient and equitable service. We respect the members of our community, the importance of a combined crime prevention alliance and the opportunity to provide a united policing effort.
We use these values in every aspect of our job. We train new officers to use these core values when they make critical decisions, and we use these values during the hiring and promotion processes. Our annual evaluation system is built around these core values. Truly, these values are essential to every member of our department and their performance each and every day.
Using these values as our foundation, we update our strategic plan/annual report each year to make sure we’re taking care of what matters most. If you’re interested, you can review this report by visiting the www.ukiahpolice.com website and clicking the annual report tab.
The report includes statistical information about crime in Ukiah, and defines our five focus areas:
Reduce crime and the fear of crime
Improve quality of life in our neighborhoods
Enhance community and police partnerships
Develop personnel
Continued accountability
It also includes information about progress toward our goals, an update on any new programs and a summary of the challenges we face. At the end of the report, we include an overall work plan and key measurements of success for the coming year.
As I mentioned earlier, our goal really is simple–it is to make Ukiah as safe as possible. I can think of no better time than the beginning of the year to think about what you’ve accomplished during the past year, and what you’d like to achieve in the New Year.
As someone smart once said, “The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
I am extremely proud of our officers and dispatchers who selflessly serve this community. In fact, I’m super-duper proud of the important work of all our first responders—police, fire, medical and dispatch. These people truly make our community a better place, a safer place.
Finally, I thank you for your support this last year. Because of your support, Ukiah truly is a great place! Happy New Year.
As always, our mission at UPD is simple: to make Ukiah as safe as possible. If you have suggestions on how we can improve please feel free to call me. If you would like to know more about crime in your neighborhood, you can sign up for telephone, cell phone and email notifications by clicking the Nixle button on our website: www.ukiahpolice.com.
