About The Department

Message From the Chief

Welcome to the South Bend Police Department's web site.

We appreciate your interest, and encourage you to visit us here often.

This web site provides you with a variety of information on how our Department works, its outstanding personnel, and a number of community based programs. We hope that you'll find this information useful in getting to know us better.

A society free from crime, violence, and accidental injury remains an unachieved ideal. It is therefore the mission of the South Bend Police Department to seek and find ways to affirmatively promote, preserve and deliver a feeling of security, safety, and productive quality services for all citizens in our community.

As an agency committed to community quality, all of our department members are trained to a high level and are dedicated to helping citizens and families improve the neighborhood environment as a means to a safer, more enjoyable community. Preventing crime is our first operational priority as we work from a community-based philosophy of policing. Working together we are most apt to make lasting improvements in our quality of life. I encourage citizens to offer suggestions on how we might provide better police services in the future.

Community Policing is a philosophy and an organizational strategy that promotes a new partnership between people and their police. It is based on the premise that both police and the citizens must work together to identify, prioritize, and solve community concerns. We must be creative and innovative as we work with neighborhoods to reduce and prevent crime, disorder and fear. We will be relentless in our efforts to identify and arrest criminals, and we must also be actively involved in helping our citizens develop long-term solutions to their community problems.

The South Bend Police Department continuously reviews the way we deploy our staffing resources in an effort to increase our ability to respond to community needs and maximize our resources. The department is continuously advancing the use of technology in order to provide the most up-to-date information to our staff to enable us to be efficient and effective. Technology, however, can never replace the value of you, the citizens, sharing information with your local law enforcement officers.

We understand that building, cultivating and maintaining the community's trust is a key element in crime reduction in our City. We are committed to reducing crime in our neighborhoods by targeting all areas of crime and community concerns. Our ultimate goal at the South Bend Police Department is to improve the quality of life for all our citizens as well as others we serve. By maintaining close partnerships in our public and private sectors, we will attain this goal. Strong connections between our Department and the citizens we serve have always been very important to us.

We encourage and enjoy interactions with the community through volunteer programs such as VIPS, our Citizens Police Academy, our Explorer Post Program, Neighborhood Watch and other community outreach programs. We encourage you to determine which program is best suited for your particular need and join us as we strive to make our city one of the safest in the state.

Chief Darryl Boykins
Chief of Police

Annual Reports
Our Annual Report is available online, as a .pdf file. You may access this information here (requires Adobe Reader)

More Information
Our website features complete information about the department operations, services, programs, and information on keeping you and our community safe. For more information about a particular area of our department, simply locate is using the navigation panel on your left.