Summer crime crackdown nets 260 arrests

AURORA | When the weather warms up, police often see a spike in crime.

But this summer, police say a 10-week summer crackdown helped slow that summertime trend by putting extra cops in high-crime areas.

Summer Crime Crackdown

The initiative, which ran from June 23 to Aug. 31, resulted in more than 260 arrests — 68 of them on felony charges — and the seizure of five handguns and several pounds of drugs.

“Obviously, they were very productive,” Aurora police Chief Dan Oates said of the 14 officers assigned to the special summer detail.

Police will analyze the crackdown’s impact on crime in the coming weeks, Oates said, but the early numbers show the crackdown worked well. Even as crime ticked up over the first half of 2012, Oates said that during the height of the crackdown, early numbers appear to show a drop in crime.

In addition to the arrests and seizures, officers issued more than 500 summonses.

The officers’ work focused on some areas in town where police often see higher than normal levels of street crime like robberies and car break-ins.

Oates said that while car break-ins may seem like a minor crime, they are an important one for police to stop because they have a major impact on victims.

“It’s a quality of life offense that impacts your impression of the neighborhood in which it occurs,” he said. “If that’s the neighborhood in which you live, it contributes to a sense of discomfort, or unease, or lack of security about your neighborhood.”

Aurora police Capt. Fran Gomez, one of the senior officers who oversaw the initiative, said officers focused on north Aurora between about east Sixth Avenue and Montview Boulevard and west of Peoria Street. Other areas included South Sable Boulevard near East Alameda Avenue, Sable near East Mississippi Avenue, and East 13th Avenue near Chambers Road.

In north Aurora particularly, where officers spent much of their time along the East Colfax Avenue corridor, officers saw a noticeable difference during the effort. Areas that were often heavily trafficked late at night, and often hot beds for crime, were sometimes quiet because of the beefed-up police presence, Gomez said.

The officers also conducted hundreds of traffic stops, issuing 482 traffic summonses and talking to hundreds of people.

Oates said those traffic stops are helpful for police because they can lead to suspects who have warrants for their arrests, or help officers gather intelligence about who is in a high-crime area at a particular time.

“A simple car stop can have so many different elements of opportunity for us to reduce crime,” he said.

The extra officers were on duty on July 20 when a gunman opened fire on the Century Aurora 16 theater, killing 12 and wounding 58. The officers were some of the first on the scene, Oates said. Because of a gag order in the criminal case for accused shooter James Holmes, Oates said he couldn’t discuss specifics of what the officers did that night, but he called them “superheroes.”

“Eventually, their story will be told,” he said. “But they were there in minutes and they were contributing to all the good work that was done that night.”

Oates said the crackdown will continue next summer, and may last 12 weeks instead of 10.

When the department announced the crackdown, some officers were reluctant to sign up, he said.

“I think there was some concern that this was all going to be about curfew enforcement,” he said.

And while the crackdown included the summer months when young people are out of school — and crime among juveniles tends to increase — the focus was on much more serious offenses, Oates said.

When next summer rolls around, Oates said he expects officers to be clamoring to be part of the operation.

“It was all about catching bad guys,” he said.