5 months ago
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FRESNO, Calif. (KSEE/KGPE) - The Fresno Police Department officially has caller enactment aft erstwhile Fresno Police Chief Paco Balderrama resigned pursuing an probe surrounding his matter with an officer's wife.
The section has named Deputy Chief Mindy Casto arsenic their interim constabulary chief.
"Nothing is much important than the extortion of this community. People successful this assemblage merit thing little than a constabulary section that's efficient, that is compassionate, and that is retired moving to bash the champion that they tin for this assemblage to support them safe," Casto said during her archetypal interrogation with our quality squad since accepting the position.
Casto says she knows she is taking connected the occupation during a high-stakes infinitesimal for the department. She says she wants to beryllium idiosyncratic some officers and the wide nationalist tin trust.
"This occupation is simply a unit cooker," she said. "Yeah, it's a dense burden. But again, this community's been truthful bully to me. It's really a privilege, and I'm precise humbled by this opportunity."
Casto started successful the section arsenic a constabulary explorer and was hired successful 1997. Over the years, she yet worked her mode up done the ranks. Casto says contempt the job's difficulties, she is inactive inspired by policing each day.
Moving forward, she says she wants to proceed the advancement already made implicit the past fewer years to little the homicide rate.
"I mean, we're down 46% this week successful shootings twelvemonth to day from past year, and past twelvemonth was an astonishing twelvemonth compared to the twelvemonth before. We're astatine 13 murders this year, aforesaid arsenic past year, but an astonishing simplification again from the twelvemonth 2021 anterior to that," Casto said.
But adjacent with those numbers trending down, she says excessively galore radical are dying connected Fresno City roads.
"We person 13 murders this year. We person 30 postulation fatalities, the bulk of which are pedestrian and bike-related," she said.
Long-term, Casto says she is not definite if she volition instrumentality implicit arsenic Chief permanently, but she knows wherefore she was chosen to pb close now.
"It's my quality to support things stable, you know, I've ne'er been known to marque decisions for my ain self-interests," she said.
