DANVILLE — Police Chief Christopher Yates gave an update on Danville crime statistics at Tuesday’s city council meeting.
Yates, who also informed the council of an increase in Crime Stoppers awards, was encouraged by some decreases in crime numbers.
“We’ve seen significant decreases in some of them, while others, such as aggravated battery… we had an increase,” Yates said.
He added that the statistics on armed robberies and homicides are accurate.
“We know that the margin of error is zero to very low on those,” Yates said.
And while the numbers for domestic batteries and sexual assaults appear lower, assaults by 20%, Yates says he finds the reduction to possibly not be exact due to the nature of the crime(s), but is encouraged by the downward trend.
“Not necessarily a margin of error in the reporting, but a margin of error of the realistic numbers that are out there,” Yates said. “So, if we see a reduction in reporting of, say, domestic battery or sexual assault, we know those numbers are much smaller than what’s actually happening out there, because of the underreporting of those types of crimes, but we’re also hoping that the numbers are going down with the number of reports going down.”
He also talked about gun violence numbers. He says in 2018 the violence “hits hard,” but says there has been a decrease since.
“I’m very happy about the trend in the direction that we’re going, but I’m nowhere satisfied with where we’re at,” Yates said. “We need to keep pushing that lower. We need to try to eliminate it altogether.”
He says the department seized 137 guns from felons last year.
“These are not firearms where someone has it just in case they have a FOID card,” Yates says. “These are more serious offenses, many possession[s] of a firearm by a convicted felon of a violent offense. Our patrol division has moved in a lot of, you know, in a direction steadily in the direction of data and intelligence-driven policing. They work very hard.”
Yates says Deputy Chief Joshua Webb is in charge of patrol division, which has 36 officers.
Yates says there were 4,374 traffic stops last year, with 53 involving canines in warrant arrests. There was only one bite out of the 53.
Yates says the ‘community housing unit’ is one of the department’s best “catalysts” for crime.
“These are proactive departments that are not married to the radio and responding to every call for service,” Yates added. “They’re able to utilize their intel, the intelligence and data that’s provided to them, both by human resources [and] our collection of data through our data specialist, as well as our crime data analysts, have any information on that the problem or any policing unit or community housing unit… ”
He mentioned the street crimes unit began patrolling the streets this past year.
“I really look forward to letting you know what they’ve done,” Yates says. “The Criminal Investigations Division is led by Deputy Chief (Doug) Miller. He assigned 953 cases last year, 828 were closed, and 125 remain open.”
Also, Yates shared that the emergency response unit, also known as SWAT, took three people into custody; five firearms were found; 8 grams of cocaine were found; law enforcement seized $610, located a murder suspect, and more.