A “first-response” drone that Burlington’s police force launched a year ago has become the focal point for a new reconnaissance program that the agency hopes will have a chilling effect on crime in the community.
Dubbed the Aerial Reconnaissance & Tactical Intelligence Center, or ARCTIC, this polar-themed venture is just one of several endeavors that police chief Alan Balog highlighted this week when he presented an annual report about the police department’s activities to Burlington’s city council.
In his report, Balog also touched on the efforts of three specialized units – a DWI enforcement team, a two-person force that’s assigned to address drug overdoses, and a police officer who’s detailed to patrol Burlington’s downtown development district.
In each case, Balog credited the viability of these new programs to the police department’s currently low vacancy rate. This relative abundance of manpower is the stark contrast from the situation in 2022, when years of high turnover had left the police department scrambling for every available officer just to fill its patrol shifts.
In response to this staffing crisis, Balog’s predecessor Brian Long persuaded the city council to approve a $9,000 hike in the base pay of every police officer. This ambitious move had an immediate effect on the agency’s recruitment and retention efforts – which Balog insisted have remained as robust as ever when he appeared before the city council at its latest monthly work session on Monday.
“Our department has been at or near fully staffed throughout 2024,” the police chief acknowledged that evening. “We’ve been able to sustain more than 85 percent of our deployable officers for more than six months. As a result of that, we have been able to create some specialized units to address some community priorities.”
Balog said that, at the moment, the department has officers installed in 146 of its 152 sworn positions, along with a 46-member professional staff that includes a bank of 9-1-1 operators and civilians who investigate car accidents.
Balog assured the city’s leaders that, in addition to being up to full strength, the police force is competent and well trained – a fact that he said was corroborated last year when the North Carolina Police Executives Association named Burlington’s police department as its law enforcement agency of the year. He went on to concede that the police force is, on average, quite young for such a high caliber outfit.
“They’re a young but very talented group of people,” he elaborated. “They’re thirsty for knowledge…and we as an organization are always investing in them so they get the right skills to be successful in a short amount of time. It’s really an insurance policy against bad outcomes.”
Balog told the city council that one benefit of having so many well-qualified officers has been the ability to establish innovative, cutting-edge units within the city’s police force. He went on to describe three of these units that have come into their own within the past year.
The police chief said that a newly-formed one-person detail has recently been tasked with addressing public complaints about vagrancy and other nuisances in the city’s downtown business district.
“They work every day with businesses, with the library, and with other public spaces to make sure they remain safe,” he added, “and that any disturbances and dealt with as quickly as possible.”
Balog also hailed the success of a special response team that the department has set up to deal with opioid overdoses. The police chief said that, in addition to providing immediate assistance to overdose victims, the team’s members have tried to ferret out the dealers and distributors who supply the narcotics.
Balog went on to credit this team with the largest annual reduction in overdoses that Burlington has seen since 2017. He added that the city, which had once logged about 20 overdose fatalities a year, has gone five months and counting without a single death due to a drug overdose.
The city’s police chief lavished equally high praise on another two-person unit that has been established to pursue drunk drivers. He added that, since its debut in the beginning of January, this unit’s members have made more than 57 DWI arrests.
“And one of those officers,” he observed, “has made more DWI arrests than any other law enforcement officer in the county.”
In addition to these specialized units, Balog called the council’s attention to the department’s juvenile diversion program, which he said has enabled 93 percent of its participants to keep their noses clean. In the meantime, he touted the department’s new reconnaissance center, which has become the headquarters for high-tech initiatives like computerized license plate readers and the department’s aforementioned drone “first responder.”
Balog told the council that, in the six months since it went live, this remote-controlled surveillance device has enabled the department to capture 16 suspects who would’ve otherwise slipped through its fingers. The city’s police chief also commended the drone’s role in search and rescue operations.
“Earlier this year,” he added, “[the drone] was solely responsible for saving the life of an 80-year-old man who fell into a creek after he went missing from a group home and would’ve almost assuredly frozen to death.”
Balog acknowledged that most of the details he presented to the council on Monday had never appeared in any of his previous briefings. But, the success of the department’s recruitment and retention efforts was already quite clear to Burlington’s mayor Jim Butler by the time the police chief delivered his annual report.
“I was talking to an elected official in another city,” the mayor said at the work session, “and he was saying ‘we hate y’all’ because we had taken some people from them.”
