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Salem Police Chief Sean Reynolds says the police department answered nearly 1,000 more calls in 2020 compared to the year. 15,391 calls were recorded during the past year. He feels more people were home as a result of COVID-19 and were seeing and reporting more incidents.

There were also 920 more traffic stops. School patrols and extra patrols for businesses fell by more than 500, keeping the increase from being even bigger.

Reynolds says there were 91 fewer traffic accidents as the number of all types of crashes fell to 238 for the year. He feels less traffic mostly due to COVID-19 is probably the reason.

Retail thefts fell 27 to 55. On the other side, burglaries more than doubled to 66. Reynolds says the big increase can be attributed to several outbreaks of burglaries to storage units. Motor vehicle burglaries were down 19 to 38.

Fraud cases increased 25 to 122. Three home invasions were reported, down one from the prior year. There were two arson cases and one case a piece of aggravated sexual abuse and assault.

The department made 2,163 arrests during the year, including 1,818 on traffic citations. That was 214 more traffic citations than the year before. There were 23 DUI tickets issued during the year.

There was a significant drop in city code violations as the city code enforcement officer worked to clear up problems before they got to the citation stage. Tickets for tall grass fell 31 to just nine. There were no
garbage and debris tickets compared to 57 the prior year. Inoperable vehicle citations fell 62 to just ten. There was no cruelty to animal tickets compared to 15 in 2019.

There were a few areas of increase. There were 31 junk storage citations, up from just nine the prior year. 31 dog running at large tickets were issued. That’s more than double the 12 issued in 1999. Loud noise complaints increased from four to 17.