AURORA | Vehicle theft has risen in Aurora by more than 30% from last year, but in the past 30 days crime across almost all categories has fallen in the city, according to data from the Aurora Police Department released during a town hall meeting held Saturday by Mayor Mike Coffman.
Police did not release details about the crime metrics. Denver Police on their crime statistics website also showed a decrease in most categories of crime over the last 28 days, compared to three-year averages.
Aurora police Division Chief Jad Lanigan provided the update on crime and police programs to about 30 residents. It was among other issues addressed by Coffman at the town hall meeting.
It’s too soon to say what’s causing the decrease and whether it will continue or if it’s just an anomaly caused by cooler weather or a return to school is too soon to say, Lanigan said. But in the midst of local and national concern about rising crime it’s a welcome piece of news for the department.
“What we’re hoping is we’re on the right trend,” he said.
Lanigan offered a free car steering wheel lock to anyone who could guess the number of car thefts the city has had so far in 2022. City Councilmember Juan Marcano won the prize with the correct answer of more than 4,200 (he then gave the car lock to someone else in the audience who said she had dealt with multiple attempts of her car being stolen).
That’s an increase of 31.3% from the previous year, Lanigan said. The problem is not unique to Aurora.
“Our numbers might look high right now but if you look across the country, the numbers are high across the board,” Lanigan said.
Currently, he said the top three most stolen vehicles in the Denver metro area between April 1 and June 30 of this year are the Chevy Silverado (463 thefts), the Hyundai Sonata (404) and the Kia Optima (362). Kias and Hyundais are particularly vulnerable because some models have a design mechanism that makes them easy to steal quickly, he said.
Along with car theft, which is considered a property crime, violent crime in the city has also risen by about 20%, Lanigan said.
Interim Chief of Police Dan Oates said that tackling vehicle thefts would be one of his main priorities during his tenure, and Lanigan discussed Oates’ decision to bring back the department’s defunct Direct Action Response Team (DART), which he hopes will help curb all types of crime across the city.
DART was initially created in the 1980s but was disbanded by former police chief Nick Metz in favor of strengthening APD’s SWAT team instead. Now, Oates has brought back the team with two dozen officers, six of whom Lanigan are coming from the department’s SWAT team, which will now have 18 people.
DART will not respond to incoming calls, and will instead use the department’s crime data to respond to hot spots in the city where certain crimes are statistically prevalent, according to police.
The DART program has now been operating around north Aurora for just over a month. In the past 30 days, Lanigan said that crime has fallen overall throughout the city with the exception of burglaries. He did not provide exact statistics about how much crime has fallen or say whether or not be believed it was a direct result of DART’s reinstatement, but said that it was a hopeful sign.
Along with fielding other questions about crime, Lanigan responded to an inquiry from an attendee about a shortage of officers in APD. He said that the department is currently down by about 50 officers and that he would like to hire more.
“If we could get a class of 100 tomorrow, we would,” he said.
He said that the department has increased officer pay to a level that places it near the top in the state in terms of compensation in the hopes of being more competitive, and Aurora is also attempting to do more out-of-state recruiting.
He said that the department is also looking at what roles that can be performed by civilians who are not sworn officers. He pointed to the Aurora Mobile Response Team as a “wildly successful” example of the city being creative in how to optimize police resources.
The team began as a pilot last year, going out on its first call on Sept. 12, 2021. Consisting of a manager, a paramedic and a mental health clinician, the team responds four days a week without police to calls that are deemed to be non-criminal mental health crises. Lanigan said he hopes the team will become permanent.
Coffman said he was recently on a police ride-along where the mental health team responded to a situation where a man armed with a knife was having a mental health crisis at a local motel. Instead of a situation where armed police broke into the man’s room in an attempt to disarmed him, which could have led to the man being shot or an officer getting injured, Coffman said the Mobile Response Team talked to him and was eventually able to get him to put down the knife and come out of his own accord.
“It was amazing how they were able to connect with this individual,” he said.
Dave Perry HATES recognizing any effective conservative-backed policies such as increased consequences for criminal acts, hence the obvious disclaimer in the headline.
The fact that this is a nationwide trend is lost on you, isn’t it? Denver also saw a drop and they didn’t implement any stiffer penalties. You know what did happen across the country last month?
School started.
You’d have a point if the data for any “increased consequences” and the data for the crime rate drop had any actual connection – but they don’t. Crime dropped BEFORE any “increased consequences” went into effect, and they dropped all over the place, even in places that didn’t have any “increased consequences”. There are a lot of things that might have impacted crime numbers – like Bart said, it may be school starting or it may be the weather changing or it may be the car locks and crime prevention supplies that APD and Marcano have been handing out – but it can’t be “increased consequences” because none of that stuff that the conservatives passed went into effect at the same time as the crime drop. Go ahead, ask the police how many punishments or even how many arrests for car theft were made in the last 28 days, much less how much “increased punishment” has been handed out. Ask ’em, HM, let us know what you find out.