Knoxville Police Chief Aaron Fuller recaps 2024 and looks ahead to 2025 for the Knoxville Police Department on today’s Let’s Talk Knoxville.

The department brought on three new officers in 2024 including Marcus Wilkins, Matthew Eagleton, and Brad Young. The department will also be hiring another officer in early 2025, which comes from a COPS hiring grant that the department was awarded. The most recent statistical update received from Police Chief Aaron Fuller was through 11 months, in which the department responded to 10,450 calls for service, had 3,130 assists, made 2,500 traffic stops, issued 1,970 warnings and 483 citations. The department had 11 incidents that required use of force and made 37 OWI arrests. These do not include the month of December.

The department held their annual Freedom 5K on July 4th and was able to celebrate Meredith Clark, who was honored by IowACE as the Community Service Officer of the year. At the end of 2024, School Resource Office Cody Nichol was honored as Knoxville Police Officer of the year. Fuller says in 2025 he wants to continue seeing growth from his department. 

“Once we get fully staffed I hope we can stay that way for quite a long time. That definitely helps especially with our specialty positions whether that’s narcotics, crisis intervention, or school resource officer. I think our mantra for 2025 is going to be growth.”

Hear more from Fuller on today and Monday’s Let’s Talk Knoxville.