The answer to the question posed in my blog title today is very simple: Yes. Residents have a strong feeling of safety and security in Eden Prairie. I think it’s one of the top reasons that people move here. Take a look at these graphs from the 2006 Quality of Life Survey. Click on any or all of them for more detail.
The two graphs on the left show information about the quality of the service that residents perceive they are receiving from the City’s Police and Fire Departments.
For the Police Department, of the 15% of the respondents who said they had had contact with the Police during the past twelve months – that’s any contact, mind you – 95% thought the Police handled the situation appropriately and 93% thought the department’s response time was excellent or good. For the Fire Department, 72% think our response time is either excellent or good and 89% said they “trust” the response and service level of the Fire Department. For Police, only 20% of our survey respondents said they were aware of our public safety programming. That’s a number we want to improve. On the Fire side, there were 23% of the respondents who were not aware that our department is staff largely by volunteers fire fighters. We need to do a better job of explaining that story to residents too.
Residents told us in the survey that their greatest public safety concern is: None. 34% reported “no” greatest public safety concern in Eden Prairie. The consultant who conducted the survey said that number is comparable to the norm for this question in other comparable Twin Cities suburbs. The highest rated public safety concern was traffic speeding at 19%.
Speaking of traffic, we asked residents about their level of concern for traffic violations. 45% of the respondents said that traffic speeding is either very or somewhat serious. 55% said traffic speeding was not too serious or not at all serious. 45% is a high number, I think. We’ll be taking a closer look at the issue this year. 28% said that sign violations was very or somewhat serious compared to 69% who said traffic sign violations were either not too serious or not at all serious. According to our consultant, that breakdown (30%/70%) is about normal.
To sum it up: Eden Prairie residents feel safe in Eden Prairie. They support the work of the Police and Fire Departments. In other survey data residents report a strong level of support for continued budgetary support for Police and Fire. Residents report that people appear to be driving too fast in Eden Prairie, which is a behavior that our Police Department can moderate.
Tomorrow: Planes, Trains, Lakes, and Liquor.
