At the time of incorporation in 1989, Temecula was faced with an important decision. Do we form new police and fire departments or do we contract for those services with the County of Riverside? Unanimously our first council decided to contract. Unquestionably that turned out to be the right choice.

Initial start up costs would have been very high and more than our new city could handle. By contracting we had the ability to be up and running almost instantly. Perhaps most important is that the county maintains the liability and not the city. This is a crucial cost-stabilizing factor.

Most people wouldn’t see any differences between a county-run or a city-run force. We hire from the same pool of candidates, the officers wear and carry Temecula Police Department badges and our cars and motorcycles bear the Temecula City seal.

Although we contract, we still have the ability to decide the levels of service that we maintain. From the very beginning we set those levels very high. We felt that a strong police presence was critical to reducing crime so we set a very aggressive standard of 1 sworn police officer per 1000 people. The state average according to the Riverside Sheriff’s Association is about 2/3 of one officer per 1000. Today we have a ratio of one officer per 950 residents so you can see that we have been very serious about maintaining public safety. Our crime rate remains among the lowest in the state.

In 2000 we felt that paramedic response times could be improved. As most cities do, we contract with American Medical Response (AMR) for our ambulance and paramedics. They perform well, but we thought Temecula could do better than a response time of slightly over 10 minutes. Most emergency medical professionals feel that it’s important to get to a victim within the first 5 minutes and if we could accomplish that, we could save additional lives. We committed large resources since that time to establish our own paramedic squads and current responses times are under that 5 minute benchmark. This action, combined with the new hospital soon to be built in Temecula, create the best medical responses possible.