When he took the job as Chattanooga’s police chief, David Roddy said he wanted to continue building community relationships, and he’s since introduced himself to multiple groups of community members at different public events.
Members of the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce got the chance to ply the new chief with questions during a Thursday breakfast at the Bessie Smith Cultural Center after he outlined the tenets and priorities of the Chattanooga Police Department.
Roddy touched on each of what he described as the three pillars of the department – community policing, intelligence-led policing and focused deterrence – explaining how each factored in bringing justice to the small number of people committing violent crimes in Chattanooga.
“Six hundred people, give or take, drive 65 percent of the violent acts in this city,” he said. “As individuals continue to commit crime in this city, as those 600 people prey on the other 180,000-something people in this city, they get everything they’ve got coming to them.”
He said the importance of each pillar was highlighted in the wake of a recent homicide investigators solved by bringing together video evidence, a working knowledge of violent residents and, perhaps most importantly, improved relationships with community members.