Crime statistics released by Columbus Police Department show a general downward trend in felony crime rates, and particularly violent crimes, over the past five years.
Chief Fred Shelton and Criminal Investigations Division head Cpl. Eric Lewis both talked about the decrease in crime during a Thursday press conference where the numbers were released to media. The numbers included major crimes like murder, armed robbery, aggravated assault and burglary for 2015-19, as well as violent crimes overall and felony arrests.
Both officers credited the decrease in crime to several factors, including increased patrols, but that one major factor was increased community cooperation with the department over the last couple of years, particularly with extremely severe cases like murder.
“It’s been essential in our investigations to where the community gets to the point where they trust us enough to give us information,” Lewis said. “In the past, it’s been a problem. But we’ve been able to, as investigators, sit down and talk to people and get the information that we need in order to lead us into the direction to affect an arrest.”
In 2018, CPD released a separate set of statistics to The Dispatch for a story on crime rates. However, those numbers are different because they were based on incidents reported to CPD, while the numbers released Thursday came from Criminal Investigation Division records on cases investigators actually worked. Shelton raised a recent example of police responding to Baptist Memorial Hospital-Golden Triangle after receiving a call about a gunshot victim, which would have been initially reported as an assault. However, police who arrived there found that the victim had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun, so CID did not open an official investigation into aggravated assault, and that accidental shooting would not be included in CID’s numbers.
So far in 2019, there have been 324 violent crimes CID investigated in Columbus, according to numbers CPD released Thursday. That’s up from last year’s 244 but down from the previous three years. Those crimes include two murders, 20 aggravated assaults (including reported aggravated domestic violence) and seven robberies, all of which are down from the last five years.
Violent crimes also include some other charges, such as sex crimes, but CPD did not include those numbers in the data released.
The 276 burglaries reported to CPD this year are an increase from last year’s 174, but still lower than 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Shelton added investigations into many of the burglaries this year have lead to the same group of suspects.
“The last group of people, we had about 10 … (who) were committing these crimes as a group, so they were doing multiple burglaries in this group. So when we arrested them, we solved five or six.
“We’re able to identify the prints from one auto burglary to another auto burglary to a home burglary and tie that suspect into the case using technology,” he added.
Felony arrests have also consistently dropped from 196 in 2015 to 155 last year and 127 this year.
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