City Council tours new STING center in Wilmington Police Dept.

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — Wilmington City Council members got an inside look at the new STING Center at the Wilmington Police Department today.

Police Chief Ralph Evangelous said the center opened in December.

Before taking city council members on a tour, Evangelous went over the city’s crime statistics. He told them they have a lot to celebrate.

“We are a much safer city today than we’ve ever been in our history,” Evangelous said.

Wilmington Police Chief Ralph Evangelous said the department has come a long way in the last few years.

“We still got some work to do,” Evangelous said. “We still have to work on the gangs situation, the heroin situation, the opidiods. All that is driving crime.”

He said he hopes the new crime center will help them continue to bring the crime rate down.

“We’re here one, to support our officers in the field, get them the most timely information and intelligence to them as they are responding to a call, a crime scene,” Evangelous said.

Evangelous said the access to cameras and surveillance all over the city helps speed up the response and investigation time.

“In the past, we’d get there and then maybe hours or days later, we would drill down on some of these things to try to determine what are some of the issues, some of the facts, some of the intelligence,” Evangelous said.

He said that has changed into a matter of minutes.

“Now, we’re trying push some of that information as they are responding to the calls,” Evangelous said.

City council approved about $230,000 to help pay for the sting center. Mayor Bill Saffo said all of the money they have spent in the last decade to fight crime is paying off.

“The men and women that are working here today are demonstrating our ability to fight crime using technology and cameras and everything at our disposal to catch the bad guys,” Saffo said.

Evangelous said the police department is in the process of reaching out to private businesses for a partnership to have access to their cameras.

“I think it’s critical that you know if we have a situation let’s say at the mall or at a shopping center or a bank or that we could get immediate access, so that our officers responding know what’s going on, can make better decisions rather than going to these places blindly,” Evangelous said.

Evangelous also said they hope to bring the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office on board at some point in the future.