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Coppell crime rates fall
By James Roth, jroth@acnpapers.com
Even though the Coppell Police Department has warned residents throughout the year of spikes in certain crimes, the yearly crime report for 2010-2011 shows that the city of Coppell continues to be a safe community for families.
During that time, the city saw a decrease in almost every category. Sgt. David Moore of the Coppell Police Department said this was a successful year for the city as far as crime goes.
"We are very pleased with our numbers and we hope they continue to go down every year," Moore said. "We are going to keep trying to do what we can to make Coppell a safe community."
"It always varies from year to year, but it could be a result of the economy," he said. "People fall on tough times and do what they have to do to make ends meet, or it causes stress and frustration and they take it out on somebody else. It is hard to pinpoint exactly why."
In addition, Moore said the theft numbers are somewhat skewed because one person who steals from multiple people results in a case report being filed for each victim.
"There were employee thefts where someone would steal from multiple coworkers," he said. "It resulted in having more crime reports, which makes the overall number go up."
In the other offense categories there were no murders or manslaughter cases in the city. Forcible rape dropped 28.57 percent, robbery decreased by 72.73 percent, burglary decreased 11.76 percent and motor vehicle theft decreased 46.94 percent.
"Even though we had a little spike of motor vehicle thefts at the end of the year we are very pleased to see that those thefts went down 46 percent this past year, it was phenomenal," Moore said.
In police activity, calls for service, traffic contacts and accidents also decreased in the past year. According to the yearly reports, there were 16,524 calls for service, a 7.81 percent decrease. There were 15,605 traffic contacts, a 6.87 percent drop from the year before. In addition, there were 225 traffic accidents, a 13.13 percent drop.
"We are very pleased to report that there were no fatalities in any traffic accidents," Moore said. "Our traffic division has done a tremendous job in keeping the streets safe."
Moore said the city of Coppell has received a reputation for pulling people over at a high rate. However, because of this reputation, he thinks it is a direct result of traffic accidents and contacts going down over the past year.
"People know we are out there and people know that if they do something wrong they are going to get stopped," he said. "I think because of that we have safer streets, because people think twice about doing the wrong thing out on the road, which results in less traffic accidents."
Criminal investigations or cases assigned increased this year by 5.59 percent. Moore said an increase in criminal investigations is a direct result of police officers gathering information from a crime scene and more residents reporting crimes as they happen to give police a better chance of catching criminals.
Lastly, there was a 9.12 percent decrease in the number of prisoners that came through Coppell last year.
"We had a total of 937 prisoners last year and that was for any type of crime or offense," he said. "Overall, we were very pleased with our numbers and we hope to build on them in the future. We continue to ask for assistance from the public, and give us a call anytime something is suspicious."
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