Town Council Work Session

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Leesburg Town Council 1h 29m 5 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 1 day ago official recording ↗

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What were the key findings of the Leesburg Police Department crime report for 2023?

Kelly Burk 2:23

Order tonight's town council work session of April eighth, two thousand twenty four. Our first item And tonight is the Leesburg Police Department crime report.

Chief Pernat 2:39

Good evening, Madam Mayor and members of the town council. To start off the crime report, I'm first gonna go over our calls for service for twenty twenty three. We had a solid increase of forty three thousand one hundred and sixty calls as compared to our twenty twenty two numbers, where we only had thirty three thousand eight hundred and eleven calls. We are still below our pre COVID call volume though, so this is not very alarming. And additionally, you will see that in the next slide, many of these calls are the result of proactive police work. So here's our top ten calls as initiated by the community on the left, and then you have the top ten calls our officers initiate on the right. And you'll see on the left the community member initiated calls, the top ten totaled 8,054, but our officer initiated calls totaled 20,895.

Chief Pernat 3:24

And a majority of these officer-initiated calls are quality of life issues addressing things like traffic. Parking violations and extra patrol requests that we receive. All right, before I get into this very busy table and the following very busy tables, I'm gonna explain to you a little bit the methodology here. So the second to last column is the percentage change from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three. The very last column is the percentage change when you take the three prior years, twenty twenty through twenty twenty two, and their average as compared to twenty twenty three, 'cause I think that's a better way to actually track. a potential trend. Now The percentages are there for everything, but the ones you really want to pay attention to are the green and the red.

Chief Pernat 4:07

A green number is a статистика синіт чан downward, which is good, where red is going to be the opposite, that's going to go up, that's going to be bad. If it's in black, that's because it's a single digit crime and there's really not enough of a sample to really consider a percentage increase or a decrease. Or it could be that there's just not a statistical change. So with that and our crimes against persons, I do want to draw your attention to the category of forcible fondling or sexual assault. We had a twenty-nine percent drop in twenty twenty three from twenty twenty two, but when you look at the three year average, we're actually at a twenty percent increase. Now, twenty twenty does skew some of our crime data because it was an anomaly due to the fact that you had less um contact between people.

Chief Pernat 4:51

Um but I also want to note that in certain crime categories, and this is certainly one, that an increase here could be just an increase in reporting and not the actual incidents. In the case of sexual assault, we've had a lot of media interest and a lot of education, so I think that has generated a lot of extra reporting due to the awareness and that's not necessarily a negative thing. The areas that have been consistently increasing though over the last few years, when you look at the three-year average, are aggravated assault, which is up thirteen percent, simple assault, which is up twenty percent, and intimidation, which is up thirty percent. When you look at our crimes against property. We've had an increase in destruction vandalism type cases up twenty-three percent.

Chief Pernat 5:33

I'm just going over the three year average comparison. The extortion blackmail is up forty-eight percent, which you can thank social media apps for that increase. That's where we're seeing a lot of that. False pretense is up seventy two percent. So that's often the crimes we see with like gift card scams or bitcoin scams. Shoplifting had a significant increase with fifty-nine percent over the previous three year average, and theft from motor vehicles also increased fifty-one percent over the previous three year average. Impersonation is going up at fifth fifty percent, but still below pre COVID numbers. Just for comparison, in twenty nineteen we did have forty-one of those cases as compared to the twenty seven cases we had last year.