New Concord Police Chief Mindy Peck announced the department received their preliminary certification for Ohio Collaborative during the April 13 New Concord Village Council meeting.
Ohio Collaborative is a community police advisory board made up of officials and criminal justice experts that work to set standards for policing.
New Concord Police Chief Mindy Peck
This specific set of standards refers to bias free policing, keeping transparent, agency recruitment and hiring, and community engagement.
New Concord joins Zanesville, Roseville, and Cambridge agencies as well as Muskingum County and Guernsey County Sheriff offices in certification. New Concord is one of few small communities that has received this certification.
Peck said she decided that this certification was something she wanted for the department.
“When I got here [New Concord Police Department], I just started researching things. During my training in London, we learned about Ohio Collaborative. So, I just looked them up and was researching and I saw the standards they had set in place for the state. We already had those standards, we comply with all that, so I started to look a little deeper to see all that we had to do to be certified,” said Peck.
Peck said she had been working on this certification for over a year to make sure the department stays compliant with these standards.
To maintain this certification, the department must document body camera usage and gender and ethnicity of every person they give a citation. This information is open for the public to see and can be found on the NCPD’s webpage. This ensures the department is as transparent as possible with the community.
Peck said having this certification will impact the community in a positive way.
“The idea behind it [Ohio Collaborative] is to improve community-police relations and to find solutions to the tensions and concerns between the community members and the police to better serve them. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a good thing. I just want to be able to say, ‘this is why we do what we do’ and have those standards to follow,” said Peck.
The next step in this certification is an audit, where an Ohio Collaborative representative comes on-site for an evaluation. This audit has been postponed due to COVID-19.
Any questions about this certification can be directed to the New Concord Police Department at (740) 826-7671.
