FeedsPolice pleased with safety survey results
Answers to a Canton public safety survey conducted last month voice a similar refrain: residents feel safe in Canton.
“Any time that you get 98 percent of residents feeling that they’re safe in the community, that’s really kind of an unbelievable number,” said John Santomauro, director of Canton Public Safety.
The department mailed out questionnaires to 3,854 residents and 1,052 of those were returned. That’s much better than the last survey attempt in 2000, when 10,000 surveys were sent with the Focus community newsletter and just 111 were returned.
Santomauro said the disappointing response six years ago “caused us to change our methodology.” This time, the public safety department included a postage paid return envelope with the questionnaire.
The results were presented to the Canton Board of Trustees at a study session Tuesday night. The questions were largely the same as those asked in 2000, and scores increased slightly in all areas.
“We really tried to keep the questions as close as we could,” Santomauro said.
Of those who returned the surveys, 98.5 percent answered yes to the question “Do you feel safe in Canton?”
Fifty-four percent of respondents said they had used the services of the police department before, with 88 percent of those saying the performance was excellent or good.
Forty people who said the services were either fair or poor said it was because of a “poor attitude” of the officer they dealt with. 24 said the response time was too long and six people blamed a poor attitude of the call taker.
Eight percent of all respondents said the image of the department was fair or poor. Residents in community policing area three, in the southeast corner of the township, were most likely to give such a response.
The fire department got slightly better numbers. Only 28 percent said they had used fire services. Ninety-nine percent of those said the services rendered were excellent or good, and 98.5 percent had a good or excellent perception of the department.
