DeKALB – In 2016, DeKalb Police Chief Gene Lowery said the city experienced the greatest increase in severe crimes he had seen in 38 years of law enforcement and juvenile crimes were off the charts.
Although severe crimes took a downturn in 2017, Lowery reported during Wednesday’s DeKalb City Council Committee of the Whole meeting that gun-related crimes were up
13 percent.
DeKalb saw a number of shots-fired incidents within a small radius of the Annie Glidden North neighborhood, many of which were committed by out-of-town offenders. Lowery said a statistic such as this is a lightning rod for community concerns, and justly so, but DeKalb police are dealing with this issue daily.
In response to these situations, Lowery highlighted the implementation of the Safe Streets Initiatives, which already caused a change in the number of calls coming in related to the area and has reduced the number of resident complaints in Welsh Park to zero.
According to the report, Part I crimes – such as murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny-theft and arson – were down about 10 percent after experiencing a dramatic 26 percent jump in 2016.
Juvenile offenses, which experienced about a 29 percent increase in 2016, stayed almost exactly the same for 2017.
DeKalb has a number of new tools to combat these offenses, such as the new COMPASS juvenile recidivism prevention program. Lowery also touted Camp Power, the annual program targeting children from University Village Apartments which received an international award in 2017, and the Adopt-a-School program.
Sixth Ward Alderman Mike Verbic asked what can be done by the council to help with policies that could get to the root cause of problems such as gun violence.
Lowery said the limited economic opportunity to create jobs, rental property surplus and poverty within DeKalb are some of the toughest issues affecting the department’s response to crime.
“Those are the things the police can’t control,” Lowery said. “Those are often symptoms in regard to communities with higher crime issues and those have to change. We can make headway, but those bigger-picture economic issues are probably the biggest challenge.”
DeKalb Mayor Jerry Smith said the average resident is probably not going to read the 2017 crime report, but when the city can take initiatives such as the apprehension of more than a dozen suspects in the Annie Glidden North shots-fired incidents, residents take notice and want to see more of that. Therefore, Smith said he hopes the council is up to the challenge of identifying some of the core issues affecting crime statistics.
A full copy of the report is available on the city of DeKalb’s website.