The Harlingen Police Department is making improvements, and that includes having more officers on patrol.

The idea to have more patrol officers on shift came from the newly appointed interim police chief, Alfredo Alvear.

"We're here to serve and we're here to protect, and to do that we need to employ certain philosophies,” Alvear said.

Alvear said prior to this new initiative, the department had at least eight officers per shift. Now, there will be 10 to 15 officers per shift, not including their supervisors.

Alvear said the new initiative will help address crimes they're seeing in the city, such as robberies and thefts.

It will also help the department with their high call volume.

The department handled more than 50 thousand calls for service in 2023.

Alvear says cities of the same size saw half that call volume. 

In addition to putting more officers on the streets, the department will go back to using crash and crime data to help create methods for better response times, and figure out where most crimes are being committed.

According to Alvear, more officers means they'll be able to respond to more calls and help deter crimes 

Watch the video above for the full story.