Crime report released

Total crime in 2007 was up 15 percent in Augusta County over the previous year, including spikes in some violent crimes, such as assault and sex offenses, according a report released Friday by the Virginia State Police.
Over the past five years, crime in the county has only increased by about one percent, according to past reports.
Across the state, there were 453,025 crimes reported last year, a drop of 1 percent from a year earlier, according to the report, which the state police compile using statistics from local agencies throughout Virginia. Violent crime in the state dropped by 2.6 percent.
A faulty computer program at the Augusta County Sheriff’s Department misreported statistics to state police throughout most of 2007, skewing data for the county, Sheriff Randy Fisher said. But crime has indeed risen – in some cases, by more than the report indicates, Fisher said.
Aggravated assaults – up by 17 incidents, or 49 percent, between 2006 and 2007, according to the report – and simple assaults – which the report says are down slightly – both actually increased, Fisher said. The rise was mostly driven by domestic confrontations, he said.
According to the report, there were five more rapes and 26 more “forcible sex offenses” in 2007 than the previous year. Those numbers are probably fairly accurate, Fisher said.
“There has been an increase in sex-related crime, absolutely,” Fisher said.
An uptick in domestic sexual abuse accounts for part of the increase, he said. But proactive enforcement measures, particularly against online predators – some of whom are lured to the area from other counties or states by officers posing in chat rooms as juveniles – have also pushed up the incident numbers, he said.
The most significant recent increase in crime, Fisher said, was in larcenies, which only increased slightly between 2006 and 2007, according to the report. Fisher attributed the trend to a persistent methamphetamine problem in the county combined with tight economic conditions. A spike in gas drive-offs has driven up the total number of larcenies considerably, he said.
Drug offenses in the county were up by 41 incidents, or 24 percent, according to the report.
Overall crime in Waynesboro dropped 12 percent during the same period, according to the report, with a 9-percent drop in violent crime and a 34-percent drop in drug offenses. Crime in Staunton also dropped slightly.
However, the disparity between crime statistics for the two cities and the county might be misleading, Deputy Chief William Maki of the Waynesboro Police Department said. Since the formation of the Verona-based Waynesboro, Augusta County, Staunton, State Police Task Force a few years ago, gang and drug enforcement have primarily been focused on the county level, Maki said.
“When you centralize, like in Verona, the emphasis on Waynesboro tends to diminish because it becomes a regional as opposed to a Waynesboro effort … ,” Maki said. “My expectation would be that, overall, in Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County, it’s probably running about the same, but the numbers have just moved around based on where the cases are developed.”
The most alarming current Waynesboro crime trend, Maki said, is a sharp increase in robberies. According to the report, there were 17 robberies in 2007, an increase of four robberies over 2006. But in 2008 that threshold has already been reached, with 17 robberies so far this year.
“If the trend continues, that would mean 34 or more for the entire year, which would in effect double the number of robberies we’ve had since 2007,” Maki said. “That’s significant.”
The jump in robberies may be the result of increased drug and gang activity, Maki said. Gang activity is harder to quantify, however, because stiff sentences for gang members meted out in Waynesboro Circuit Court have made participants very reluctant to identify themselves, he said.
People should hesitate before attaching too much importance to short-term changes in crime statistics, said James Alan Fox, a professor of law, policy and society at Northeastern University in Boston. Nationally, crime levels are up slightly over the past six or seven years, Fox said. But levels are considerably lower than they were 20 years ago, he said.
“It’s very easy to be misled by one year to the next,” Fox said. “A one-year increase: I wouldn’t pay too much attention to it.”