Population increase leading to more crime
It’s no secret that our community is growing and that growth comes with a lot of positives and some negatives.
Drug arrests are up by doubled since 2013 and have been up by double digits for the last four years. There is also a large number of cold cases that the department is dealing with. We spoke with Chief Bryce Johnson to find out how the police force is dealing with these growing pains.
“The drug problem is much bigger than what we arrest for. Those are just the arrests we’ve made so we know that’s on the increase. We see heroin and methamphetamine that we see,” says Chief Johnson.
The department is seeing a large call volume, especially for mental health purposes, which is not a crime.
“Just massive increases in the number of mental illness calls. Suicides, suicide attempts investigations, those things. Those have increased about 30% year over year from 2016 to 2017.”
There are about 600 cold cases over the past decade that the department wants to solve.
“Violent, felony person crimes. About 600 of those from 2008. And as technology has changed there may be some really good leads in those cases that we just can’t get to because there’s so many of them and we’ve got our current workload and we need to figure out a way to work those cold cases to try to bring justice and closure to the families and hold people accountable.”
With the population and crime increasing the police department needs to expand to keep up. The department has vacancies and is hiring. They will be doing a public safety testing on Friday, and if you would like to sign up here’s the link.
