Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
After a busy start last year, the number of calls to Sweet Home Police Department in 2007 decreased by 2 percent from 2006.
The Police Department responded to 8,824 calls for service in 2007, down from 9,002 in 2006 and nearly 14 percent below the record of 9,547 calls the department received in 2005.
“It’s definitely down from 2005,” Police Chief Bob Burford said, which “was a peak year. It was almost an anomaly year, and we’ve been glad that that didn’t hold.”
Police officials don’t know yet where they are on their bellwether crimes – theft, burglaries and criminal mischief – for 2007. They are busy putting together statistics from 2007 for their state and federal reports.
Burford said his gut instinct is that the number of those three crimes should be down considerably from what had been a bad year, he said. It’s still early though, and police don’t have a lot of stats compiled yet.
“We did get authorization to add a police officer effective July 1,” Burford said. The department started the hiring process, but it already had two positions open.
“We hired all three positions in the fall,” Burford said. “And just this week we’ll be putting the first one of those out on the street.”
A second new officer is finishing the 16-week police academy, and another is just about to start. After police academy, the officers spend time with a training officer locally before working solo.
At the same time, another officer is out on long-term disability, Burford said, so the department has been down four officers.
It will be almost a year before Sweet Home begins seeing the full benefit of the new officer, he said.
When that happens, the department will have two officers dedicated to traffic patrol.
The department started out 2007 busier than 2006, Burford said, running about five days ahead in terms of calls at the end of May.
But by mid-year, things slowed down, giving the officers “more time to deal with the tiny pebbles in the community’s shoe,” Burford said. Traffic problems, he said, are mainly community irritants, but dealing with them makes the community feel better.
When the new officers are working on their own, the department also will have two full-time detectives, Burford said. Right now, the department is operating with one full-time detective.
“Somewhere, around the first of December, the call load started picking up, back to normal,” Burford said, but officers are still finding time to patrol traffic.
The new year has gotten off to a brisk start, he said. Ten days into 2008, the department had more calls than it did in the first 10 days of 2007, which were busier than the first 10 days of 2006, Burford said.