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| Written by Aaron Cedeño | |||
| Wednesday, 27 January 2010 09:00 | |||
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When asked what a layman might take away from a read-through of the Louisburg Police Department’s 2009 crime report, Police Chief Ron Anderson’s response is simple. “That this is a very safe city to live in, number one,” he said. The Louisburg Police Department released the annual report last week, outlining all of the police department’s activity during the previous 12 months. In the area of major crimes, the city continues to rate very highly, Anderson said, as there were no murders, robberies or aggravated assaults, as well as one reported case of rape and 21 burglaries. Though the burglaries stand out among that crowd, he said, the fact of the matter is that 21 is a low figure for any city, no matter the size. On the positive side, he continued, many of the burglaries are non-aggravated in nature, which likely means a storage locker or garage is being broken in to. It’s a far different trend from a city like Leawood, in which he worked before arriving in Louisburg. “When somebody would burgle a residence, they’d burgle a residence,” Anderson said. “I mean, they would take everything of value in that residence, and we don’t experience that here.” The single rape case and 21 burglaries represent the slightest of increases in 2009 when compared to 2008, in which no rapes and 20 burglaries were reported. Each other major crime category held steady at zero. A few other figures highlighted the report, including an increase in identity theft cases from six in 2008 to 24 in 2009, and vehicle lock-outs, up from 178 in 2008 to 209 last year. Identity theft is one of the most difficult crimes to pursue, Anderson explained, because the crime itself rarely takes place in Louisburg. Many cases still take place electronically, though that trend is declining, with credit and debit card numbers of Louisburg residents being snatched on-line, and used to purchase everything from gasoline to big-box electronics. Its far-reaching nature makes it difficult to investigate, he said. “Even if we had 20 investigators on staff we wouldn’t have the resources,” Anderson said. “We wouldn’t have the money to start off with to investigate that.” Still, many cases likely stem from an over-reliance on the use of credit and debit cards as opposed to cash, he noted. There are many instances in which cards are out of their owner’s hands, such as when paying for a meal at a restaurant — providing a theft-minded individual with a golden opportunity to copy the numbers. “People have to use good common sense and be responsible for the security of their personal information,” Anderson said. The most frequently reported incident for the police department in 2009, however, was not of a criminal nature. In each of the past five years, vehicle lock-outs have been the biggest issue the police department is asked to address. At the Jan. 18 meeting of the Louisburg City Council, City Administrator Jeff Cantrell noted that if a single vehicle lock-out call took 10 minutes to complete, that would mean Louisburg police officers spent almost 35 hours helping residents get back in to their cars. It’s a service they’re happy to provide, Anderson said, but it’s one fewer and fewer cities are continuing to offer. “We’re finding that we’re getting repeat people locking themselves out of their cars two or three times,” he said. “We’re starting to tell them ‘Hey, this has got to stop,’ because it does take up a lot of our time.” Overall, Anderson felt Louisburg remained a very safe place to both live and work — a status he attributed not just to the quality of the police department, but the quality of the community at-large. “The people have a lot to do with it, too,” he said. “They take the right precautions and they don’t make themselves victims.”
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