Police

The New Albany Police Department earned National Accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) in 2019. Established in 1979, CALEA is a credentialing authority created through the joint efforts of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) and Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), to:

• Strengthen crime prevention and control capabilities;
• Formalize essential management procedures;
• Establish fair and nondiscriminatory personnel practices;
• Improve service delivery;
• Solidify interagency cooperation and coordination; and
• Increase community and staff confidence.

CALEA’s three year process included a self-assessment step where policies and operations were brought into compliance with CALEA’s proven standards. At the end of the self-assessment the department participated in two mock assessments before beginning the CALEA web-based assessment and the on-site assessment. CALEA assessors then submitted their report to the Commission for consideration. CALEA found the New Albany Police Department to be in full compliance of all 155 applicable standards covering every aspect of its public safety mission.

The New Albany Police Department is now one of less than 70 law enforcement agencies out of approximately 1,000 in Ohio to earn CALEA accreditation, which reflects to our residents and business partners how committed the New Albany Police Department is to meeting a national standard of excellence. Our officers, communications technicians and civilian staff understand that today, more than ever, we must strive to build upon our values of professionalism, integrity, respect and compassion while protecting our community.

Anyone wishing to provide comments regarding the police department’s compliance with CALEA standards, engagement in the service community, delivery of public safety services, and overall candidacy for accredited status, may provide comments to CALEA through the following Public Comment Portal: https://cimrs2.calea.org/833

These comments can be in the form of commendations or concerns. The overall intent of the accreditation process is to provide the police department with information to support continuous improvement, as well as foster the pursuit of professional excellence.

In addition its CALEA national accreditation, the department is also a part of the Ohio Collaborative, a 12-person panel of law enforcement experts and community leaders from throughout Ohio that established state standards for use of force including use of deadly force and agency employee recruitment and hiring that can help guide law enforcement agencies in Ohio. These standards hold everyone accountable and instill a greater confidence with the public. The Ohio Collaborative works closely with partners, including the community and law enforcement agencies, to implement these standards. All law enforcement agencies are expected to meet or exceed these new standards as they develop policies and procedures to meet these new expectations. The Ohio Collaborative also provided model policies as a resource for agencies, and the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services serves as a contact and is available to assist agencies with implementation.

9-1-1 dispatchers understand that callers may be under a great deal of stress and are trained to provide help in a timely and professional manner. When calling 9-1-1, please keep in mind the following tips:

• Stay calm

When callers are scared or agitated, they are sometimes difficult to understand. Staying calm helps get questions answered more quickly and the appropriate help dispatched more easily.

• State the nature of your problem quickly and clearly.

Until dispatchers know the nature of the call, they cannot begin to ask the questions most relevant to solving the problem and sending help. When calling 9-1-1, state the problem and be prepared to answer follow-up questions.

• Be prepared to give your location and phone number.

In most cases when someone calls 9-1-1, the address and telephone number are immediately available to the dispatcher; however, cellular callers cannot be located unless they tell us where they are. If you don’t know an exact address, look for intersections or landmarks such as nearby businesses. Memorize your mobile phone number.

• Answer the dispatcher’s questions simply and directly.

When asked yes or no questions, reply simply yes or no. If asked to describe something, be prepared to provide as much detail as clearly and concisely as possible. Follow any instructions that the call-taker gives you for your own safety.

• Don’t hang up!

Don’t hang up when you think that the conversation is over with the call-taker. The dispatcher on the phone is your link to the officer, paramedic or firefighters in route. In many cases, field units in route to a call may ask questions that the dispatcher needs to ask the caller. Also, staying on the phone during a crisis or altercation will potentially allow the call-taker to hear a crime or will let us know that you are safe.

• 9-1-1 hang ups

Per policy, New Albany police officers respond to all 9-1-1 calls where the caller either hangs up prior to the dispatcher completing the call, or when there is an open line or accidental call. Dispatchers will call the number back, but a police response will also be sent in order to ensure that what the caller stated is happening is in fact happening. If you call 9-1-1 accidentally, please stay on the line so that the dispatcher can speak to you.

The New Albany Police Department staffs a 24/7 communications dispatch center. New Albany dispatchers are responsible for answering multiple administrative and 9-1-1 lines ranging from animal complaints, residential and commercial alarm drops, crimes in progress, public disturbances, traffic complaints, automobile crashes and fire and medical emergencies. Dispatchers respond to nearly 5,000 calls for service annually. Fire emergencies are also part of our 9-1-1 response system. We work closely with the Plain Township Fire Department, which provides fire and emergency medical service to New Albany residents.

Dispatchers log each officer’s activities daily in the computer aided dispatch (CAD) system, information which includes arrive-on-scene times, disposition and in-depth information on each call. Our dispatchers also enter warrants, protection orders, missing persons, stolen vehicles, stolen license plates, stolen guns and stolen articles into the LEADS and National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer systems.

All dispatchers of the New Albany Police Department are state of Ohio Notary Publics and their Notary services are available to the public, free of charge, 24 hours a day.

Our dispatchers are also all certified through the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International, the world’s oldest and largest organization of public safety communications professionals. By completing this certification, our dispatchers demonstrate that they meet or exceed industry training standards and follow the best practices set forth by APCO.

With the explosion of smart phones and other mobile devices, residents can now provide tips through the MyPD smart phone app.

The MyPD app won’t replace 9-1-1 by any means. If you see something happening that may be a medical or life threatening emergency, please call 9-1-1 immediately. But for those times when you have a general police question, have information about an ongoing investigation, or want to provide feedback about our staff, this app allows you to conveniently access your police department at the touch of an icon on your mobile device. MyPD also allows you to download pictures along with text, something you can’t do over the phone. This information then automatically gets sent via email to the New Albany police dispatcher on duty.

Those downloading the app will be asked to insert the country, state and city they want to download. The country and state fields must be chosen before you can enter New Albany as the city. The entire process takes no more than a couple of minutes. Once New Albany is chosen and the app is downloaded onto your mobile device, residents have another easy 24/7 means of access to their local police department. For those submitting questions, please remember to insert contact information or police staff will not be able to respond.

New Albany utilizes CodeRED™ to notify the entire community or targeted areas in case of an emergency or urgent situations that require immediate attention.  CodeRED™ is a high-speed telephone communication service available for emergency notifications. Examples of notifications may include natural disasters (tornado warnings/watches, fires), man-made disasters (terrorism, chemical spills, gas leaks), search and rescue (missing children, adults or disabled persons) and crime (prisoner escape warnings, sexual offender/predator alerts).

CodeRED™ uses a database of phone numbers and emails that is offered at no cost to residents and businesses. The information in the CodeRED™ database is secure and confidential and will only be used for emergency notification purposes.

Please click here to register for CodeRED™.

Severe Weather Awareness – residents can receive severe weather alerts as part of their CodeRED™ registration. Additionally, residents can learn more about how to prepare for severe weather events at the Franklin County Emergency Management and Homeland Security website:  www.franklincountyohio.gov/emahs.

Your child has the opportunity to participate in our upcoming bicycle rodeo, an event that teaches safe bicycling skills to children ranging in age from 5-12. The bicycle rodeo will include a safety inspection and a series of skill stations directly related to everyday bicycling situations. Participants will practice starting and stopping, safely exiting a driveway, the proper way to look for traffic, negotiating an intersection, and avoiding common road hazards that often lead to accidents. Participants can also go on a training ride through the trails at Swickard Woods under the supervision of a New Albany Police bike officer. We encourage your child to attend this educational bicycle safety event. To participate, make sure your child brings a bicycle and helmet.

The New Albany Police Department maintains several active Block Watch programs. If you live in New Albany and are interested in starting a Block Watch program in your neighborhood, please contact the department at 614-855-1234.

This free interactive nine-week training program is designed to provide insight into law enforcement and a working knowledge of the values and operations of the New Albany Police Department. Participants learn about the unique challenges faced by law enforcement as they take part in tabletop exercises and real-life scenarios that require split-second decision making. Taught by New Albany Police Department personnel, instruction has been designed to inform residents about various topics and provide opportunities for engagement and community input. Topics of instruction may include:

• Orientation to law enforcement and modern policing
• Patrol and emergency dispatch operations
• Criminal law/search and seizure
• Control and arrest tactics, response to resistance, and traffic stops
• Drug enforcement
• Shoot/don’t shoot judgment scenarios
• Crime scene investigation

Enrollment in the CPA is not designed to train the participant for a career in law enforcement.

Residents of the City of New Albany, Plain Township, and the New Albany-Plain Local School District who are at least 18 years of age are welcome to apply. Where space is limited, priority will be given to New Albany residents and applicants must commit to attending seven of the nine weekly sessions.

Applications may be submitted from October 1 to October 31 each year and will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis. All applicants will be subject to a background check and the New Albany Police Department reserves the right to deny acceptance to any applicant. Applicants will be notified by email that the NAPD received their application, and applicants will receive further emails regarding their acceptance into the program. Questions? Email CPA@newalbanypolice.org for more info.

This self-defense program is open to females 18-years-of-age or older who are interested in obtaining self-defense training and understanding the options they have when encountering sexual assault, harassment, domestic violence or other types of crime. The class covers current statistics, laws and common crimes of choice, as well as awareness, self-defense tactics and risk recognition. This high-impact course teaches easy-to-use self-defense techniques, not martial arts. The department has offered this free, multi-day course to more than 1,000 women. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis. Call 614-855-1234 or email Officer Leland Kelly at lkelly@newalbanypolice.org for more information.

Digital (Webcheck) and rolled inked prints on form FD-258 fingerprinting services are offered to the public.

Those who require fingerprinting services for a background check can be fingerprinted on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. This service is by appointment only. To schedule an appointment, please call 614-855-8576. If you are in need of digital prints, please bring this completed form with you to your appointment. BCI and FBI reason codes are required to complete your digital fingerprint transaction.

Beginning November 1, 2020, this service is only available to New Albany residents and those who work within New Albany corporate limits. People utilizing these services will be charged $25 for digital fingerprinting associated with state background checks and $30 for digital fingerprinting associated with federal background checks. Processing prints on form FD-258 are no charge. The general public who neither live nor work in New Albany cannot utilize these services.

Residents of the City of New Albany and New Albany-Plain Local School District are able to stop by the New Albany Police Department 24/7 to pick up a free gun lock. According to Ohio law, it is the legal responsibility of a gun owner to safely store firearms. Remember that if a gun is in the house, always keep it unloaded, locked, and out of reach and sight of children. Ammunition should be locked in a separate location. Thank you for doing your part to keep our community safe! Click here to learn more about gun safety.

Safety Town is a safety awareness program held each summer for children who will be entering kindergarten or first grade in the fall.  Each day, the program explores a different safety topic, including stranger awareness, water safety, fire safety, pedestrian and bicycle safety, animal safety and school bus safety. All Safety Town instructors are state-certified elementary school teachers. More than 4,000 children have graduated. Continued support from our sponsors, including State Farm, Mounty Carmel, the New Albany Community Foundation and the New Albany Woman’s Network, has been integral to the success of this now well-established program. For more information visit http://newalbanysafetytown.org

Education is a community core value and New Albany City Council has consistently underwritten all costs associated with the school resource officer position stationed on the New Albany Plain Local Schools campus throughout the school year. The New Albany Police Department assigns a school resource officer and DARE office on the school learning campus.

Special Duty Hours

M-F 8:00 AM – 4:30 PM (closed on all city holidays)

Phone: 614-855-8576

Email: reports@newalbanypolice.org

Special Duty refers to the hiring of off-duty police officer(s) for security or traffic control. To request a Special Duty officer, please complete the Special Duty Request Form under the “online forms” section on this page or call 614-855-8576.

Note: Special Duty requests are filled on a voluntary basis, filling out the Special Duty Request Form does not guarantee that the request will be filled.

Special Duty Rates Per Hour – 2023

Cruiser (per cruiser and billed separately) – $10

Security Detail – $52.00

Road Detail – $56.00

Supervisor Detail – $60.00

*Minimum charge: Three hours pay per officer.

**The charge for a sergeant is only assessed for events that necessitate the use of three or more officers.

Special Duty Cancellation Policy – All cancellations must be made at least two (2) hours prior to the start of the request.  If the officer is not canceled in sufficient time, a three-hour fee will be assessed for each officer.

Disclaimer – Approval of a request to hire off-duty police officers is at the sole discretion of the New Albany Police Department. To ensure the safety and security of both the public and our officers, each request is reviewed for sufficient staffing, and the department may make recommendations.  The department reserves the right to decline job requests that may be deemed inappropriate or unsafe for police officers.

Speed trailers are frequently utilized to help educate and slow motorists on New Albany streets. These trailers are deployed to streets where complaints occur and where those complaints have been confirmed by a Stealth Stat traffic study. New Albany police have two trailers. They don’t collect traffic information and no camera is used to cite speeding motorists. When deployed, these trailer display posted speed limits. When approaching vehicles exceed the posted speed limit by a pre determined amount, the sign board will begin flashing the vehicle’s speed. Additionally, red and blue strobe lights on the side of the sign board will flash to obtain the motorist attention and alert them of their speed. The speed trailer is often deployed before officers begin speeding enforcement. Educating motorists of the speed limit and their vehicular speed to gain voluntary compliance to the speed limit is preferred over writing speeding citations. To request the placement of speed trailer on a particular street, please contact the police department at info@newalbanypolice.org.

The New Albany Police Department uses Stealth Stat, a device to gather information about traffic on roadways. Unlike the speed trailer, Stealth Stat is small and blends in with the surroundings so that it does not influence motorist driving habits.

Stealth Stat provides an 85^th percentile speed of vehicles traveling along a road, a number reflecting the average speed of the vast majority of motorists. Stealth Stat also can provide the ten mile pace, which is the ten mile per hour range that contains the greatest number of vehicles surveyed. Because most drivers are law abiding safe drivers, the 85th percentile speed and ten mile per hour range are two factors used in determining appropriate speed limits.

When the police department receives a speeding complaint for a particular road, a Stealth Stat survey is often one of the first activities completed. Data from Stealth Stat surveys assists police staff in determining if a speeding problem is perception or reality. Sometimes complainants believe cars are speeding on their street but a Stealth Stat survey indicates otherwise.

The New Albany Urban Deer Management Program, which began in 2004, has successfully decreased the number of vehicle-deer crashes in the community while simultaneously decreasing complaints from local landowners who experienced landscape damage caused by overgrazing.

Hunting in New Albany is prohibited except on land that is designated to be part of the Urban Deer Management Program and only then by hunters who are annually chosen and officially recognized by the New Albany Police Department to be a part of the program. For land to be eligible for the Urban Deer Management Program, the landowner must sign a Hold Harmless Agreement and the area to be hunted must be approved by the police department and be given a hunting zone number.

2022-2023 

The 2022-2023 deer hunter list is complete and no new hunters will be added for the season.

In our continuing efforts to make the community as safe as possible, the New Albany Police Department provides free vacation house checks to residents. By completing and submitting the online form here, the police department will check on your residence during your time away from home. Always remember to call 614-855-1234 when you return home to cancel your vacation house watch.

• New Albany Police Department Organizational Chart
• AMBER Alert – A voluntary partnership between law-enforcement agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases.
• Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International
• Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforement Agencies (CALEA)
• Columbus Division of Police
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Justice: Office on Violence Against Women – Provides federal leadership in developing the nation’s capacity to reduce violence against women and administer justice for and strengthen services to victims of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
• Department of Justice: Office for Victims of Crime – Committed to enhancing the nation’s capactity to assist crime victims and to providing leadership in changing attitudes, policies, and practices to promote justice and healing for all victims of crime.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.)
• Franklin County Children Services – Provides protection, care and permanency for children who are abused, neglected or dependent.
• Franklin County Sheriff’s Office
• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children – Serves as the nation’s clearinghouse on issues related to missing and sexually exploited children.
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
• Ohio Collaborative
• Ohio Department of Public Safety
• Ohio State Highway Patrol
• Ohio Substance Use Disorder Resources 
• Safe Kids Worldwide – A global organization dedicated to preventing injuries in children.
• Sexual Assault Response Network of Central Ohio (S.A.R.N.C.O.) – Sexual violence intervention and prevention program serving Franklin County.
• Stopbullying.gov – Provides information from various government agencies on what bullying is, what cyberbullying is, who is at risk, and how you can prevent and respond to bullying.
• The Partnership at Drugfree.org – Translates the science of teen drug use and addiction for families.
• U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Victim Notification Program – Allows eligible victims and witnesses to obtain reliable and timely information regarding a criminal alien’s release from custody.