Lakewood's Violent Crimes Drop

Lakewood Police Chief Bret Farrar gave a report on the at a City Council study session on Monday night. Crime is down in general, he said, but individual areas have shown an increase based on the department's analytics.

Farrar said that a recent report shows there were 31 violent crimes this April, 18 fewer than the 49 in April 2010. However, other types of crime have increased. Auto thefts increased nearly 50 percent, from 13 in April 2010 to 24 in April 2011.

Farrar said that since the various law-enforcement agencies, such as the Lakewood police, the Pierce County Sheriff's Office and the FBI, use different filters to categorize the crimes, there is an issue in how the statistics are reported.

"We have no problem with telling people what the crime rate is," Farrar said. "It is just a matter of determining what that is compared to what everyone else is reporting."

The city reports its crime statistics through the Law Enforcement Support Agency using one system. That information goes to the FBI for national statistic gathering, which uses different crime codes and methods that don't always coincide with the Lakewood police Department's methods, Farrar explained.

"You can see how the numbers are a moving target," Farrar said.

There are a few elements that complicate the crime reports, Farrar said. Alleged attacks reported by patients at Western State Hospital are often false. Those police reports into the hospital are tallied into the city's crime stats even though the cases might not go further than a police report. And the Joint Base Lewis McChord's population does not factor into the city's population.

"There is a whole population out there that is not being counted," Farrar said about JBLM.

Large swings in monthly crime states, drug dealing for example, might be a simple matter of a long-term case coming to a close or statistics being updated retroactively. A swath of were arrested recently that may be attributed to the increase in drug busts this year.

Drug busts are, in fact, up this year. Lakewood police reported an increase of more than 45 percent in drug-related incidents, including possession and manufacturing, from April 2010 to April 2011. There have been 122 drug reports this year, compared to 109 to this date in 2010, an increase of about 12 percent.

Misdemeanor domestic violence is down compared to last year by 7 percent. There were 121 reported domestic violence incidents last April compared to 107 this April. Other related crimes like check forgery, fraud and counterfeiting are down compared to last year, the report stated.

Click for the full breakdown of crime reports in Lakewood.