Jane Perlov, a native of New York City, spent eighteen years with the New York Police Department before becoming secretary of public safety for Massachusetts. In New York, she worked at the 30th precinct in Harlem. There she worked to foster a better relationship between the police and the public, also reducing homicides and other crimes in her 2.5 years there. She was sworn in as Raleigh’s new Chief of Police, the first woman to hold that position, on September 17, 2001.
Some of the early changes Chief Perlov made to the department centered around patrolling. She felt that the sizes of downtown beats were small, and didn’t warrant having officers patrol them in cars. Instead, she had more officers walking their beats or riding scooters. She planned to decentralize the department, introducing a precinct system to outlying districts.
In January of 2002, seeking to improve the relaying of information from the police department to the public, Chief Perlov created a new position – public information officer. This new civilian position would prepare news releases, handle record requests for public information related to police activities, and other media-related issues. This was mean to create a single point of contact within the department, rather than having members of the media contacting different supervisors.
On March 2, 2007, Jane Perlov left the Raleigh Police Department to take a job in Charlotte, providing corporate security. During her time as Chief, she introduced technological advances, such as CompStat, a computerized system to analyze crime patterns. Although some questions about internal oversight were raised during her tenure, overall crime rates went down during her first five years in office. Her largest legacy was the reorganizing of police districts, which was designed to strengthen relationships between the police and individual communities they served by putting substations and officers within those communities.