Police Beat Program

Police Beats ensure the policing needs of local areas are met with a service customised to each individual locality. Beat policing is a strategy designed to make individual police officers responsible for the community’s policing needs in a defined geographical area.

Police Beat officers provide a proactive service aimed at enriching the community with front line services promoting personal safety and reducing the fear of crime, while establishing a convenient and relaxed environment where people can talk to the police. Police Officers regularly patrol and engage with the community to identify problems and then develop strategies to solve them.

Our Police Beats aim to:

• Reduce crime rates and the number of calls for service;
  
• Identify and target local problem areas
  
• Reduce the fear of crime
  
• To provide a place where local community members can talk with police.
  

Neighbourhood Police Beats

Neighborhood policing has become a popular crime-fighting strategy across the country, but there is no one definition of community policing or one specific way of carrying it out. From the start, the Los Santos Police Department has taken a no nonsense approach to crime and violence. Neighborhood Policing is a philosophy - one of a partnership between police and law-abiding citizens to create permanent solutions to problems that lead to crime.

Neighbourhood Police Beats provide Los Santos with an effective policing presence in urban situations. The program was launched in 2013. There are currently 28 Neighbourhood Police Beats operating across Los Santos.


What are Beat Officers?

With a neighborhood policing approach a knowledgeable team of neighborhood beat officers is formed, to serve and provide service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This team is assigned to each one of Los Santos Police Department's police beats. Every beat is grouped together with 2 to 3 other beats to form a neighborhood policing sector. Each sector has a Watch Commander who is accountable for the events that happen within a neighborhood to a Precinct Commander, and ultimately to the Chief of Police and the citizens we serve and protect. Beat officers meet with citizens and one another, exchange information and make relief from these neighborhood stations.

Are My Beat Officers Always the Same?

Beat officers patrol the same beat, within the same neighborhood. This neighborhood policing approach is used successfully with not only the neighborhoods in unincorporated Los Santos, but with the 28 city districts that have made the decision to make Los Santos Police their exclusive provider of professional law enforcement. Los Santos Police beat officers serve the community 365 days a year and consistently spend their time responding to every call for police service received by our fully staffed state-of-the-art communications center.

How are Beat Officers Sent to Calls?

To help maintain beat integrity and to ensure a rapid response to emergency calls for service, the Police Department uses a CAD (Computer Aided Dispatching) or MDC (Mobile Data Computer) system and has adopted a policy to insure the efficiencies associated with how police cars are dispatched. Under this policy calls are prioritized. Emergency calls are dispatched immediately. Those calls that do not require an immediate response or have experienced a significant delay before being called in, will be dispatched immediately unless the beat officer is out of service. In that event the call can be held for up to 30 minutes, thereby allowing the beat officer to finish their assignment and accept the pending call. If the call is to obtain a report for insurance requirements the caller may speak to one of our CARE (Computer Assisted Report Entry) operators. The finished report is then electronically provided to the beat officer and supervisors working in the area where the incident had taken place.

Are My Officers Well-trained?

Beat officers are professionally trained, POST certified commissioned officers, using fully equipped, motorized police vehicles. They provide patrol to our citizens in their squad cars, as well as on police Motorbikes. The Los Santos and Municipal Academy developed a community training standard for local law enforcement agencies that was used as a model by the State of San Andreas for their Peace Officers' Continuing Education requirement. The Los Santos Police Department continues to set high standards, as indicated by the Department's professional accreditation in all three areas of certification: department, training academy, and communications. Los Santos Police Department is one of the few in the world and the only in San Andreas to have all three accreditations.


Report Crime ... Make the Call

Help us do our jobs; If you see a crime in progress or another emergency situation that requires an immediate police response, call 911. Provide the call-taker with a good description of the incident, the offender, and the exact location.

Non-emergency calls to 911 can slow the response time to true emergencies.