APPLETON, WI (WTAQ) – Appleton Police are taking a look back at the trends of incidents that officers responded to in 2021.
One of the most drastic rises involved mental health. Officer Meghan Cash says mental health-related incidents rocketed up 72-percent over the year prior. But there is a caveat to that statistic.
“The amount of people that we had to place in mental health detention actually went down the last 3 years,” Cash said. “It means that some of the programs that we have going on are working, and the partnerships that we have with our community are really starting to take effect.”
Some of those incidents may have been related to stressors of the pandemic, but Cash credits a large part of that rise to improved officer training.
“A lot of it is just the training and the efforts we’ve been putting in for our officers, especially across the fox valley, to understand and try to address mental health in a different way than we’ve seen before,” Cash said. “Our officers are able to identify and understand sometimes just an awareness of mental health playing a role in the crime at times.”
Another increase in calls came in connection to traffic stops and cops out on the streets.
“Our traffic enforcement went up dramatically based on a lot of the citizen complaints we were getting and some of the trends we’re seeing in our downtown district,” Cash told WTAQ News. “For us to focus on traffic enforcement, especially this last fall, was something in the summer that where we noticed there was a higher need…More people were out, more events related to vehicles became a popular trend within the pandemic, so it’s something that we saw as far as behavior changing and traffic related enforcement needing to go up.”
Violent crimes were also slightly higher, especially in one specific area.
“[We saw] an increase in aggravated assaults. Most of those, however, are related to domestic violence,” Cash said.
She says that rise emphasizes the importance of victim services officers and partnerships with places like Harbor House to work with victims.
Nearly every other area stayed relatively close to the numbers from years passed or saw no dramatic changes over 2020. Cash says the ability to lock in on those trouble areas and tackle the bigger issues is a huge advantage.
“[We have a] crime analyst that’s able to pull some numbers for us. So we’re responding a lot smarter than maybe we were in years past when it comes to the areas that we need to address…Historically, there was a lot of anecdotal information. Now, we’re able to really look at an area and say ‘what are those calls for service? what does that look like,’ in some trends, and respond to those trends appropriately,” Cash explained. “2021 is a very small step and a snapshot of how we can address some of the things that we’re seeing within our city that maybe in years passed, we weren’t able to do.”
You can find a crime map that tracks incidents across the City of Appleton right here. You can narrow searches by date ranges and specific incident types as well.
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