T-R PHOTO BY ROBERT MAHARRY Marshalltown Police Chief Mike Tupper presented the department’s annual report to the city council during Monday night’s meeting.

2022 was another busy year for the Marshalltown Police Department, and Chief Mike Tupper recapped some of the highlights, statistics and challenges during the presentation of his annual report at Monday night’s city council meeting.

Tupper took about six minutes to summarize the 24-page document, which was shared as part of the agenda packet and can be viewed in its entirety at https://www.marshalltown-ia.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Item/7503?fileID=18625, and thanked MPD Administrative Assistant Anna Vaughn for her work in putting it together. In all, the department responded to almost 28,000 calls for service in 2022 (27,711, to be exact, for an average of about 76 per day), and Tupper said the major challenges they face include recruitment and retention of high quality employees, building community relationships and dealing with budget constraints.

“Our police department has dealt with a few challenges over the last year, but (employees) continue to be up to the challenge and they work very hard. I’m very proud of the men and women serving in the police department, not just the sworn police officers but our civilian staff,” he said. “They all do a very good job. We have a very good police department here.”

As he dove into the individual challenges more specifically, Tupper noted that “every police department in this country” is hiring right now, and the MPD is competing with other agencies in the state for a limited pool of applicants.

“It’s a shallow pool right now, and when I start hearing my peers in cities like Ankeny and West Des Moines and Dubuque and Iowa City complain about the applicant pool and how difficult it is to maintain their staffing, you know it’s a difficult challenge that many agencies are facing,” he said. “So we’re gonna continue to do everything that we can to make sure that we’re recruiting the best and keeping people here once they’re here. It’s something that we’re working on.”

He then segued into the community relations segment and said his officers — there are usually five on patrol at any given time — can’t be everywhere at once, and Tupper encouraged the public to be actively engaged in law enforcement to keep the community safe.

“It’s all about building relationships and trust and transparency, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that over the 12 years that I’ve been your police chief,” he said. “But that job never ends, and we need to continue to work on that.”

Referencing the decisions council members must make regarding the city budget on a weekly and monthly business, Tupper then discussed his own department’s financial situation, noting that despite a zero budget, the Citizens Police Academy has continued to thrive over the years.

He added that the budget comes into play during salary negotiations for officers, which ultimately can go hand in hand with retaining them.

Turning his attention to the statistics, Tupper was happy to report that violent crime is rare in Marshalltown — with only a handful of homicides over the last few years — and cited those numbers as a point of pride for the department.

“When the violent crime does occur, your police officers and detectives work very fast and very hard to resolve those crimes quickly,” he said. “I think we have a demonstrated history of doing that.”

He conceded, however, that there is “too much” property crime in the community, and it often directly ties into drug activity.

“Every community in Iowa, every community in the United States, has a drug problem. It’s not just Marshalltown, but that drug problem drives a lot of the criminal activity that we see,” Tupper said. “So people steal to try to get a little money so they can go out and buy drugs. So we need to find ways to work with the community to address these issues, and it’s gonna take a multidisciplinary approach to address the problems of addiction and homelessness and mental health in our community. And we’ve started to do that with MPACT. That’s a good first step, but we’re gonna have to find a way to be more proactive when it comes to addressing drug crime so that we can reduce some of our property crimes.”

Tupper said he had a few ideas on how to make that happen, and he looked forward to discussing them with the council at a later date. According to the chief, the department will be putting together another two-year strategic plan beginning in September involving city staff, community partners and community members.

Before he opened up the floor to questions, Tupper reported an uptick in fentanyl, heroin and opioid activity within the town and said it concerns him and keeps him awake at night.

“It’s something that we’re monitoring very closely, so we’re gonna have to make sure that we’re taking active steps to address those problems as they come up,” he said.

In summation, the chief characterized 2022 as “a very successful year” and expressed pride in the employees of the MPD who are working to keep the community safe and be part of the solution. Councilor Jeff Schneider asked Tupper about whether the fentanyl issues were arising from individuals who are ingesting the potent narcotic on purpose or if other drugs are being laced with it.

“It’s a little bit of both,” the chief responded. “But we’re seeing more and more people that are looking for it, and they’re buying it intentionally and bringing it into our community. It’s a problem.”

Resident Jim Shaw then inquired about how short-staffed the department currently is, and Tupper said there were five vacancies with three applicants being processed under conditional offers who will, if all goes according to plan, be heading to the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy in August. There are currently 37 sworn officers employed at the MPD, and although the goal is to get to 42, in the chief’s opinion, there is easily enough work for 50.

Among the 27,711 calls for service in 2022, the most common types were building checks (3,741), traffic stops (3,058), follow-ups (1,855) and public contacts (1,594). There were 809 vehicle accidents, 783 welfare checks, 497 calls for theft, 280 for burglary, 134 drug related calls, 64 sex crime calls, 45 death investigations and a single robbery call.

Use of force incidents more than doubled in 2022 after hovering between 95 and 113 between 2018 and 2021, with 262 such instances reported last year. Officers deployed tasers 19 times in 2022, and there were 19 assaults on officers reported, which were both up from nine and 11 such incidents in 2021, respectively.

“On Jan. 1, 2022, the Marshalltown Police Department implemented an electronic use of force reporting system. Having reports entered in a digital format allows for more accurate accounting of use of force incidents, more consistency in reporting, and more accountability through shift level and administrative review,” the report reads. “The new system allows our agency to track additional non-lethal force options that were not recorded in previous years.”

Although the total number of arrests by MPD officers increased from 1,708 in 2021 to 2,249 in 2022, the number is still down substantially from a five-year high of 2,955 back in 2018. After dropping to 1,422 in 2020, traffic citations have trended back upwards in the years since, and there were 1,938 of them issued in 2022.

A total of 431 crashes were reported in 2022, down from 499 the year prior. The total number of reports processed has trended downward over the last five years, with 2,746 in 2022.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.