Salem Police Chief Sean Reynolds says 2021 was a busy year for the police department with calls increasing nearly 12-percent with dispatchers creating nearly 21,000 incidents for police, fire, and EMS. The call volume for the police department alone jumped more than 1,700 calls to 17,132.
Reynolds talked about the positive trends.
“I was pleased that crimes against persons and crimes against property seemed to be down overall. We had a major uptick in arrests but that is attributed to warrant arrests. Our officers getting out there looking for people on warrants for skipping their court dates and such.”
Burglary cases dropped from 66 to 29 while motor vehicle burglaries were down 38 to 25. There were two armed robbery cases compared to none the year before.
Criminal damage to property charges fell by more than half to 54 while criminal trespass charges were up by 50 to 143.
Fraud cases dropped 29 to 93. Reynolds feels the decrease can be attributed to most people being more cautious about believing unsolicited offers. He reports most of the fraud cases last year were the passing of counterfeit bills and unemployment insurance fraud. Criminal sexual assault cases dropped from four to eight and criminal sexual abuse cases were down from ten to two.
Reynolds does have concerns about trends he’s seeing with drug use.
“The major uptick in methamphetamine arrests, they doubled from 17 to 34 this past year, and we had a number of overdoses that went from 20-30 this year too so obviously methamphetamine use and abuse is a concern.”
Reynolds labels methamphetamine as the city’s major drug problem. He says some of the overdose calls can be attributed to meth now being laced with fentanyl.
Reynolds says traffic crashes increased 63 to 301. He says increased traffic out of the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020 may be part of the reason.
Adult arrests were up more than 200 to 496 in 2021. Warrant arrests jumped from 68 to 150. Retail theft arrests more than doubled to 58. Reynolds credits a large part of the increase to Walmart having a better loss prevention program in place.
There were arrests in both armed robberies. In addition to the 34 possession of meth arrests, 14 others were made for possession of other controlled substances.
Reynolds feels there may be a COVID-19 explanation for the big drop in juvenile arrests from 53 to just nine. He feels juveniles got in less trouble last year once they were back in class instead of being on remote learning.
