During the January 15th City Council meeting, the interim Chief of Police Eric McBride and the Assistant San Bernardino County Fire Chief Dan Mejia presented their 2019 year reviews. Our Police Department has continued to maintain their high level of filled positions while increasing the amount of new hires. We currently have 249 filed positions with 32 new hires eager to get out and serve our community. This is a 15% increase from our 2015 filed positions.
Our City’s Forensic Bureau did some extraordinary work in 2019, out of the 3,600 calls for service they were able to lift 240 latent prints resulting in 229 of those returning with named suspects. Our investigations unit also had some great success last year. After the implementation of community oriented policing our homicide clearance rate went form 47% to 78%, San Bernardino is no longer a place to commit crimes, you will get caught.
Our police have helped clean up our streets in many ways; they had great success in managing our homeless population. In 2019 they removed over 1,000 homeless encampments and had over 3,000 homeless contacts. Our crime numbers for 2019 had large decreases across the board, criminal homicide was down over 6, robbery decreased by 7, and burglary was down by 9%. Our increased police presence through community oriented policing has continued to make San Bernardino a safer city.
Dan Mejia the San Bernardino County Fire Chief also provided some good statistics for 2019. The response times have continued to improve for Type 1 emergency with the average response time being under 5 minutes. Our fire services responded to almost 3,000 fire incidents in 2019 and over 20,000 medical and traffic collision incidents. They also performed over 450 plan checks to ensure that fire and life safety is provided and maintained in our buildings.