Hello, I’m Christopher Pike, Commissioner for Ward 3, the city of Albany. I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that we are doing in the downtown area.

We’ve invested a lot of resources into revitalizing the downtown, making it a place where people want to come and live and work and do business. And so we initiated a lot of programs. And one of the programs that we’ve done to really help alleviate the misconception that there’s a lot of crime downtown. Now, as we know, any time you have a group of people, you’re going to have crimes. We could have a police officer on every corner, but that’s not going to eliminate crimes happening, but I think the important thing for people to understand is that when crimes do occur, we are very proactive in getting crimes solved, making arrests and getting convictions.

And so that’s important for people to know that these aren’t problems that are just lingering on for an exorbitant amount of time. We’re making arrests, sometimes the same day or the next day, but at most two or three days after the crime takes place, we’re making arrests. We’re also being more proactive with installing more cameras in the downtown are so that people can rest assured that there’s eyes on the streets and their places are being monitored.

We’re also being very proactive in having police presence downtown. We actually have officers that are committed to just the downtown area pretty much 24/7. And so they’re constantly patrolling. Every time I’m downtown, I’m always seeing a police officer and I kid with the Police Chief and I tell him, you all must watch me on the cameras and every time I walk out of a building, you make sure a police officer passes by. So I always see them. But there’s always a good police presence downtown. So people should feel very comfortable about coming downtown and working downtown and doing business in the downtown area because we are being very proactive in making sure that the downtown is successful as far a crime is concerned.