Crime continues to go down in Polk County - News Chief

Marilyn Meyer @marilyn_ledger

Throughout Polk County, crime continues a downward trend, according to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

Taken together the total crimes reported countywide dropped by 9 percent over three years, 2014 through 2016.

Individually, each city and unincorporated Polk County is on a downward trend in the number of crimes committed per 100 people.

Over the three years, jurisdictions’ crime rates dropped by:

• 42 percent in Davenport.

• 34 percent in Haines City; 32 percent in Auburndale.

• 29 percent Lake Hamilton; 28 percent in Lake Alfred; 26 percent in Lake Wales.

• 13 percent in Bartow; 11 percent in unincorporated Polk County, including the cities, towns and villages that contract with the Sheriff’s Department: Polk City, Frostproof, Eagle Lake, Fort Meade, Dundee, Mulberry, Hillcrest Heights and Highland Park.

• 9 percent in Winter Haven; 7 percent in Lakeland.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program is based upon law enforcement agencies voluntarily reporting violent crimes to the FBI’s database violent crimes — murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — and the specific property crimes of burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft. The compiled numbers show a snapshot for various communities, although comparisons can be difficult because of differences among communities in population, demographics, income levels, commerce and geography, and because of differences among how agencies are staffed, the software they use to report crime, how they classify a crime and other variables.

“A couple of bad days can certainly drive your statistics one way or the other in a small community,” said Police Chief Art Bodenheimer of Lake Alfred, which has a population 5,728. “We had a murder in 2015 and none last year so that drops the violent crime rate by 100 percent. With property crime, burglaries go up and then go down depending on whether certain people are in jail or not.''

Davenport, with a population of 4,277 and only 57 crimes, and Lake Hamilton, with a population of 1,315 and 75 crimes, can also see huge swings in statistics by only a few crimes. Still, Davenport had the lowest crime rate in the county – 1.33 crimes per 100 people.

“Since being accredited in 2015, we have better professionalism in the department and better case closures," said Davenport Lt. Darrin Ortega. The 11-member department, including the chief, concentrates on patrol, requiring officers to walk neighborhoods and knock on doors – including in the rapidly developing new subdivisions on the west side of town, Ortega said.

“You go into a neighborhood and see one or two cops walking around, you don’t want to go in there and commit crime,'' Ortega said.

Good, not-so-good numbers

Both the Winter Haven Police Department and the Polk County Sheriff’s Office cite historic lows in the crime rates in their jurisdictions, 3.88 crimes per 100 people in Winter Haven and 1.87 crimes per 100 people in the Sheriff’s Office jurisdiction.

“This is the lowest crime rate ever measured in the Polk County Sheriff's Office jurisdiction, breaking the previous record low of 1.95 crimes per 100 from last year,” said Carrie Horstman, Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman. “Reliable crime statistics in Polk County started in 1971, when the crime rate was recorded at 4.16 crimes per 100.”

The Sheriff’s Office's jurisdiction includes 420,686 people, more than four times the number covered by the next largest jurisdiction — heavily urban Lakeland — so it is not subject to the drastic percentage swings a single crime can cause in small communities. From 2015 to 2016, the Sheriff’s Office recorded a 4.1 percent drop in the year-to-year crime rate and a 2 percent drop in the number of crimes — from 8,041 to 7,880.

This was the eighth consecutive year that crime numbers and the crime rate have declined in the Sheriff’s Office jurisdiction, Horstman said.

Winter Haven’s 2016 crime rate of 3.88 is much higher than the rural areas of the county but is on par with seven other Central Florida cities with populations in the 35,000 to 45,000 population range. Plant City, Winter Garden, Altamonte Springs and Ocoee all had rates in the 3.7 to 4.0 crimes per 100 people. Oviedo, Winter Springs and Dunedin each had considerably lower crime rates, in the 1.18 to 2.08 range.

"We are extremely optimistic about the crime reduction we are seeing as we move forward with Winter Haven's crime suppression model and community policing philosophy," said Winter Haven Chief Charlie Bird.

Bird, citing the work of officers, community partnership and prevention strategies, said he is confident the crime rate will continue to decrease. The number of crimes reported to the database, 1,535 crimes, is a 3.6 percent drop from the previous year, he said.

Prevention, other tactics

Police officials at other local agencies also credit part of the declining crime rate to strong community policing to establish bonds with neighborhoods, prevention efforts by residents, such as not leaving car doors unlocked and garage doors open, and crime suppression tactics such as monitoring repeat offenders.

Haines City Police Chief Gary Hester quoted Sir Robert Peel, who is considered the model for modern American policing, as saying the greatest measure of police success is absence of crime.

“Our job is to help prevent what we can prevent and help solve the others,” Hester said. "Although it can be difficult to prevent crimes of passion that happen in the heat of the moment, some violent crime can be prevented, such as robberies by providing high-security video systems.

“We police don’t control crime by ourselves. It takes community involvement, he said, noting “significantly more theft and burglary occur when entries are not secured.”

Hester, who has been chief in Haines City for less than two months, said he has to credit the hard work of the men and women of the department and the cooperation of the community for the low crime rate, 2.12 crimes per 100 people,

“I am very much committed to data-driven policing,” Hester said. “Haines City has had a fairly good run the last few years. But the first few months of this year we are seeing upticks and we are trying to get our arms around that. The challenge we are having here, and it is both a challenge and an opportunity, is we are growing so fast. Our population grew 2.6 percent last year.”

Auburndale Deputy Police Chief Andy Ray cited an old saying in police circles that 20 percent of the criminals are responsible for 80 percent of the crime.

“There is a small number of known criminals who commit serial crimes and are responsible for much more crime than others, who commit occasional crimes," Ray said. "If you arrest one of those, the number of crimes will go down while he is behind bars.”

And, Ray said, most Polk communities are impacted by gangs out of the Orlando and Tampa areas that commit property crimes along the Interstate 4 corridor, such as stealing electronics and auto parts from stores, shoplifting clothing and other merchandise and putting scamming devices on gas pumps and ATMs.

With Auburndale’s 32 percent clearance rate, “I feel that is a pretty decent number for us. So many crimes are not witnessed so it takes a lot of work on the part of detectives and officers to identify suspects,” Ray said.

Clearance rates

Clearance rates can vary by such things as whether a suspect is arrested by a local officer or picked up on a warrant issued through the courts; whether major retailers that report shoplifting incidents follow through with prosecution – meaning an arrest is made; whether an agency focuses on clearing cases by making arrests or focuses on conferences with prosecutors to ensure arrests hold up in court; and whether a particular agency gets credit in multi-agency efforts.

In Polk County, clearance rates range from 48.3 percent in Lake Wales to 14.2 percent in Lakeland. The Sheriff’s Office’s clearance rate was 32.2 percent. Lakeland officials would not comment on its clearance rate, instead pointing to the city’s continuing dropping crime rate.

Lakeland’s Assistant Police Chief Mike Link cited the city’s 15.3 percent reduction in violent crimes in 2016 and an average reduction of 25 percent in violent crime when compared with 2014.

“We are very proud to see a dramatic increase in gang-related shootings, dropping from 18 shootings in 2014 to only one in 2016,” Link said. “This is a testament not only to the hard work of our officers and staff but to our citizens who are actively involved in their neighborhoods.”

With a bit of digging in the numbers, the clearance rate in Lakeland, which has a population of 102,507, is not unusual for similar sized cities with crime rates higher than 5 per 100 people. Lakeland recorded 5.3 crimes per 100 people and had a clearance rate of 14.2 percent; West Palm Beach, reported 6 crimes per 100 people and had a clearance rate of 10.7 percent; and Pompano Beach had 5.7 crimes per 100 people and a clearance rate of 19.8 percent.

Even among smaller cities, population 15,000 to 25,000, Lake Wales’ clearance rate of 48.1 percent appears exceptional. The city recorded a crime rate of 3.66 crimes per 100 people.

“Our clearance rate boils down a lot of good people, a good community with Crime Stoppers, and giving everything as much attention as we can,” said Lake Wales Police Chief Chris Velasquez. “We tie things together to link cases, go back and see if we can clear as many cases as we can. It’s not that we can’t go up and down in numbers, the other agencies do that, too, but we work hard at it.”

There is a special emphasis on solving larcenies and shoplifting cases, he said, a category that accounted for 412 of Lake Wales’ 563 crimes last year.

In Bartow, population 18,888, there were 5.2 crimes per 100 people, with a total of 990 crimes -- much higher than three similarly sized communities in Polk County. But when Bartow compares itself to its previous-year numbers, there is a 6.4 percent drop in the crime rate and a 2.8 percent drop in the number of crimes.

“We seem like we are in period when crime is in a trough,” said Sgt. Eric Sherouse. With the lower numbers in smaller cities, numbers cannot necessarily be correlated with percentages, he said. “But we have seen drops with our community approach to policing and in the reaction in the community to engage in crime prevention.”

Bartow’s community policing efforts now extend to assigning not only patrol officers but also detectives to specific areas to investigate crimes, he said.

Velasquez emphasized that throughout Polk County, the agencies work together to solve crime. “The criminals do not know boundaries,” he said.

“The residents of Polk County and the cities are safe because of the partnerships we have with the other agencies. We all work together,” Velasquez said.

Marilyn Meyer can be reached at marilyn.meyer@theledger.com or 863-802-7558. Follow her on Twitter @marilyn_ledger.

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