GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – With just a couple weeks left in 2017, Green Bay Police is touting a drop off in crime from last year.
“It looks like we’re going to end the year with about an 8% decrease in total crime. At the end of October, we showed a 9.64% decrease.”
Chief Andrew Smith says it’s been an especially good calendar for the most serious crime.
“We had no reportable homicides throghout the entire year up until today. That would be the first year where Green Bay has experienced zero homicides since 1981.”
Smith notes burglaries are down 24% from last year, with reported rapes falling 21%.
Arson is the one crime category where there has been a notable increase, jumping 100% from 9 instances to 18.
Officer Mike Knetzger says the city’s roads have also been safer in one notable regard this year compared to the recent past, with only one OWI fatality.
He notes that number has been as high as six in previous years.
It’s an important issue for Knetzger, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver back in 2008.
He shares the department’s statistics since that tragedy occurred.
“Over 6,000 OWI arrests. The average BAC (blood alcohol content) of the drunk driver we arrest is .18 (when the legal limit is .08).”
The agency has only had the one incident since cracking down on drunk driving in February 2016.
For the positive crime reports, Smith credits both the officers working under him and the community partnerships that have led a large number of tips being offered.
Despite the projected crime drop from last year, Smith says they’re still looking to make improvements.
One possibility is officer body cameras, which could come in handy during events like one officer encountered in November.
Smith says a highly-intoxicated woman claimed the officer used excessive force, despite being three times the legal limit and having no recollection of the incident.
“We have a sworn affidavit from a witness who said this women reached out to him on social media and said ‘I don’t remember what happened, but can you lie about the incident, because I’m planning on suing the police department.’”
Prior to the incident, Smith says the woman was falling down drunk, refused to exit a stranger’s vehicle that she had entered, aggressively approached the officer, and was belligerent to jail staff.
He believes the woman’s injuries were the result of her intoxicated state.
Smith says the officer acted appropriately, but notes the case has prompted death threats to the department, reading ‘all pigs should die,’ in reference to law enforcement.
The chief says they’ll work with the city attorney’s office to look into possible charges against the woman.
He also notes the department has quite a bit of turnover on the horizon, with 13 retirements by year’s end.
That total is projected to jump to 50-60 of their current 187 person staff within the next five years.
“We’re going to be light-handed for probably the first three months of the year, maybe even four. The good news is that crime really dips in Green Bay in January, February, and March.”
As he has stated in the past, Smith says there is no shortage of applicants, noting he could ‘hire 40 people today,’ if he wanted.
However, Smith notes the desire to bring in ‘the best of the best,’ putting an emphasis on the applicants’ character, in addition to any testing and past record.
He also thanks the Green Bay Police Foundation for donating $67,000 to purchase the helmets and vests that are now in every squad car, as well as a $26,000 contribution that is used for department initiatives such as the Explorers program, implicit bias training, and ‘Bring Your Own Five’ basketball tournaments.
