Five Things to Know About Hopkins Crime

Last year’s crime stats are in, and the news is good.

Police Chief Mike Reynolds told council members Tuesday night that the most serious types of crime declined from the previous year. Overall, Hopkins is safer.

But the news is a bit more complex than simply whether overall crime improved. Here’s a look a five key trends evident in last year’s crime statis.

In nearly every key area, the number of offenses plummeted.

Violent crime, which fell more than a third, saw the most hopeful signs. Not a single category of violent crime increased. There were fewer rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults—and no murders.

A vast range of other categories also saw improvement. Car thefts were half what they were in 2009. Drug crimes dropped 15 percent. Burglaries dropped 9 percent.

Overall, crime decreased a much-more modest 1 percent. Yet nearly all of the most serious crimes saw declines.

Pinning down a cause isn’t easy, but the falling numbers come as the department is plowing full speed ahead with a number of anti-crime initiatives, many of them done in conjunction with other city departments or even outside organizations.

Over the past few years, Hopkins has invested enormous effort into improving the Blake Road neighborhood—long a troublesome crime spot.

So-called nuisances also continue to be a major focus in the anti-crime efforts. A Hopkins ordinance includes a provision that allows the city to temporarily shut down a rental property after three notifications for “disorderly conduct.” In 2010, police and city inspectors initiated 110 nuisance cases, of which two received a third notification. In both cases, eviction happened just before the council took action to close the property.

More recently, the department divided the city into sectors that allow officers to focus more specifically on individual areas and troubleshoot any problems that arise.

National statistics aren’t in yet, but Reynolds said he expects Hopkins to compare favorably against other cities.

“I’m guessing this number is gong to pretty much blow out of the water the national average,” he said.

Thefts are the biggest exception to Hopkins’ overwhelmingly optimistic crime report. They jumped from 289 in 2009 to 382 in 2010—a 32-percent increase.

While the city had a couple other troubling areas—fraud grew by 23 percent, for example—theft saw the biggest increase even at the same time it is by far the largest category.  It’s growth trumped even small categories, such as criminal sexual conduct, where just one or two additional offenses can cause a steep spike proportionally.

Thefts so skewed Hopkins’ crime statistics that the city would have had a nearly 7 percent drop in overall crime if thefts had stayed stable.

Why did thefts jump so much? Reynolds speculated that the bad economy may have something to do with it—but added that other crimes usually spike during bad times, as well. Clearly, that didn’t happen in Hopkins.

Although calls dipped half a percent, officers remain on the go.

Much of the workload has little to do with crime. Medical calls, which account for one out of every 13 calls, jumped 11 percent. Psychiatric calls jumped 47 percent.

Many of the calls weren’t even emergencies. Just a little over half of the 9,194 9-1-1 calls required an officer to respond—although Hopkins police stress that residents should call 9-1-1 whenever they see something suspicious, even if they’re not certain there’s a crime

Alarms were a clearer example of unnecessarily adding to the workload. Hopkins received 431 alarm calls in 2010, an increase of more than a fifth. Just 13 of those alarms reflected an actual burglary. The city collected about $19,000 in fees for false alarms and failure to register an alarm.

It wasn’t a good year to be on Hopkins’ roads. The number of crashes grew by more than a quarter, and there was one death.

To compound the problem, Reynolds said there is no one particular area where the crashes are happening.

The good news? Drivers were a bit less likely to be hurt in all those extra wrecks. Crashes with injury went down by four, although that was partially offset by a two-crash increase in hit-and-run incidents with injury. Meanwhile, drunken driving plummeted by 17 percent.

A clear majority of 9-1-1 calls—59 percent—now come from wireless phones. These calls grew by about 7 percent over 2009. At the same time, the increasing use of Voice Over IP (VOIP) phones is set to erode the use of landlines even faster.