BEND, OR -- About 20,000 Bend households will soon receive a request to complete a community survey on the police department, "It goes to about half the households, which gives us a really great sample size," says Police Chief Mike Krantz, We hope to get around 15-20% response. We'd love to get more, but that's a really high response rate for a survey." Krantz tells KBND News, "Since 2017, we've done this every two years and Portland State University does the survey for us. They ensure that it's a statistically valid survey, they do all the research on the back end, they provide the results to us in a report that comes out early in 2025."

The resulting data from PSU essentially a report card. Krantz says they aske a variety of questions, "Particularly around trust; it's important for a police agency to have trust from the community on the job that we do. We've consistently held really high levels of trust with our community and we want to monitor that and ensure that the things that we're doing builds that and doesn't diminish it. Do they feel safe in town? Do they feel they could call the police and we would do that work and take it seriously? Do they feel that certain areas of town are unsafe or more safe than others? What major problems do they think the police department should focus on?"

He says traffic safety is consistently a top concern, "For instance, in our 2021 survey, traffic safety again was high, concerns around DUI drivers. And we added two DUI enforcement officers, specifically to address those issues."

He expects to get a full report on the results early next year, "And we take that information into our budget session, we take it into our strategic planning of how we're going to shape the department in the future." The survey is conducted online and is only available to people who receive a mailed invitation. Past results can be found HERE.