Bangor Police Chief Scott Alo presented the department’s year-end statistics to the village board at the board’s Jan. 12 meeting and, despite an unforeseen budget hit, the year turned out to be successful from the law enforcement standpoint.

When, a year ago last December, Rockland decided not to contract for police protection, it represented a nearly $40,000 cut to the Bangor Police Department budget. And that was on top of other cuts to the budget. Alo went from three full-time officers to two full-timers and a part-timer.

“It had a big effect on my budget, plus I lost a full-time officer,” Alo said. “It was a real challenge, but in the end it worked out well — we’re doing the best we can with what we have.”

Out of 2,567 incidents and calls handled by Alo and his men in 2009, they made 88 arrests and 421 traffic stops. They also issued 295 warnings, 173 citations, 263 parking citations and 47 ordinance citations.

Although the department assisted the West Salem Police Department 27 times, it was the La Crosse Sheriff’s Department that Bangor officers assisted more often (52 times) than any other agency.

“We’re happy to do it — any time we can help them out we will,” Alo said.

Surprisingly, the community had only five driving under the influence incidents for the entire year. “I’d say that’s pretty good for 365 days,” Alo said.

He was also pleased with the fact that all but a couple of the seven burglaries reported had been cleared.

One of the biggest numbers on Alo’s incident report was the 60 times the department responded to “trouble with juvenile.”

“Those were mostly calls to the high school for things like truancy and disorderly conduct,” Alo said, “and most were for the second semester last year. This year, we seem to have a much more compliant group of kids up there.”

By far the biggest numbers in terms of frequency were the 1,532 incidents associated with “community oriented policing.” These are the actions that don’t necessarily show up in the statistics but contribute to a safer community.

Things like pulling doors (checking businesses to ensure doors have been locked), making sure the parks are empty after hours and doing checks of the homes of people away on vacation. “We’ve got snowbirds who spend part of the winter elsewhere, and we’ll check on their homes for them,” Alo said.

This week the department received a new CF30 laptop computer for one of its squad cars. “We were using a unit that we got back in 2002 as part of a grant. It was getting really slow and the touch screen had a tendency to float in and out,” Alo said. “When it comes to computers you really have to keep up to speed — especially with the county having up to date equipment.”

The new squad car laptop is just the latest effort to increase the department’s computer efficiency. Alo said the computers in his office are working a lot faster than they did a few months ago.

“We’re getting there,” he said of the efforts to stay on top of the latest technology. “We’ve essentially wiped everything clean and installed new operating systems.

Although his department no longer services Rockland, Alo said there is a mutual assistance agreement in effect where Bangor police will respond to emergencies there.

“We’re still talking to Rockland and, although they are kind of financially strapped right now, I could see a time in the future where we might work out some kind of agreement again,” Alo said. “We’d be happy to do it if it could be worked out.”