Police Chief Chris Karrer
Menifee’s newly sworn in Police Chief Chris Karrer was part of the original team that set up the new department — the one that would replace the Riverside County Sheriffs in July of 2020.
He was born in Pomona in 1975 andattending junior high school in Chino when he first set his sights on a career in law enforcement.
Here are highlights of what he shared in a conversation with journalist Don Ray this week:
“After I graduated, I joined the Marine Corps went off and served, and trained, and did all the fun things that I got to do.”
“That whole pride in the service to people just confirmed that I wanted to get into law enforcement.”
“Prior to the creation of the Menifee Police Department, it was the Riverside County Sheriffs that were responsible here.”
“We met a few of their deputies that were working out here. We had conversations with them, and they would talk to us about how the roadways had changed, and traffic volumes had increased.”
“And, they would let us know, you know what neighborhoods were growing. ‘Just pay attention to the growing trend, because people have different ideas of what policing is as they come from all these different regions.’”
“Lessons learned? To have a bigger traffic division. We started off understanding that we needed to have boots on the ground, and we needed to have patrol officers out there. And we thought that our initial three traffic officers would be able to handle citations and traffic flow along with the patrol officers.”
”What we found was that Newport Road alone is a just massive highway that requires attention Three was not enough. So, our lesson learned, we had to expand to six.”
“If we could do it all over again, we would have started with six, and we’d be pushing for twelve.”
“Our biggest challenge is just waiting to see what laws are going to be impacting us. Our state continues to evolve. And our state continues to restrict what law enforcement can do. And we want to be supportive. We want to be that enforcement piece of what the voters want. We also want to make sure that the that the legislators are not diminishing the safety of the public through some of these restrictions.”
“If you want to make personal contact with me, you will usually come through our front counter, or you can make a phone call, I’m not impossible to get ahold of. I have an email that’s publicized. Send me an email. Leave me a voicemail. I will look at whatever point of contact or communication is being made. And if it needs to be addressed by me directly, I’ll make that phone call — I’ll send back the email. I may give them to one of the captains that can really address it appropriately.”
“So, I’m not a hard person to find. And it’s important that I remain very easy to be found.”
“I’m honored to be here, and just truly excited for this opportunity to keep us moving forward.”
“We’re going to keep seeing new faces and we’re going to keep having to answer questions from people of what’s different about us than where they came from. And we must continue to build on the trust that we’ve been handed.”
“ I tell our officers, ‘Don’t ever do anything that’s going to lose that trust or your respect for the community.’”
“Our goal is to continue building upon our foundation that we started three years ago.”
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