it's important to keep in mind why we do this the purpose for us to keep track of crime data is really basically three-fold one is to assist us in making rapid deployments to trouble spots to try to get on top of crime trends that emerge a second reason we keep this data is to try to understand the nature of our problem whose symptom is crime there may be something else going on that is making certain targets attractive certain individuals more active or something else that if we can get to that issue we can have a long-term effect on the crime rate and the third reason we report out is so the public knows what's happening in its city so they can take steps to protect themselves as well as to help us deal with the problem so this year as we examined our crime trends we saw some anomalies that were concerning to us and it's those things that are represented in increases in robberies increases in burglaries and increases in car thefts compared to last year long-term trends we're still in great shape we're down 21 percent in total crime compared to the year before i got here we're down 23 percent in violent crime overall which happily translates into about 25 000 fewer crime victims over the last four years but nonetheless the things we saw this year affecting robbery burglary and car theft are concerning and we want to share that with the public well a couple of very dramatic things appear to have happened whether they're long-term trends or not we don't know you know we've looked at our five-year trend lines and most of our crime is well within the five-year trend the anomaly burglary there we're seeing a significant a statistically significant increase and what we see with burglary and what we see with car theft is we saw the spikes and we started analyzing what was being stolen and we discovered that in march scrap metal reached an all-time high and how much it cost per pound over four dollars a pound we also found at the same time that something on the order of fifteen percent of our stolen cars were turning up in scrap yards those are the ones we recovered there's still a large number not recovered at all one might reasonably assume a lot of them made their way to scrap yards as well we found that we were arresting tow truck drivers with freshly stolen cars on the back of their tow trucks we also found we examined burglaries to something on the order of 11 or 12 percent of our burglaries were houses being stripped of metal now burglary i think was up on the order of something like six percent and we're looking at you know twice that percentage was just metal thefts alone and so we're recognizing that although we're locking up lots of burglars and we are the point is that we now have an industry driven by the price of metal that's encouraging a lot of people to go into car theft and to go into stripping metal from houses that's a problem and one that we're going to look at exploring legislatively to see if we can come up with tighter regulations governing the turning over of scrap metal for payment at scrap yards well the goal is develop just tighter regulations right now it's very easy to scrap a car there's very little documentation required of someone bringing your car in it's at this the legislation just as weak it's not so much the scrappers are intentionally doing something bad the legislation is very weak somebody can show up with a seven-year-old car at the back of a tow truck and not have a lot of trouble disposing of it so we're looking at the regulations now we're going to be approaching both the city from an ordinance point of view but also the state to see if we can tighten up the regulations and discourage what is in fact an industry and the same goes true obviously for a metal that's stolen from houses as well well we've been engaged in conversations with the scrap yards we've put details of officers down there keeping an eye on who's bringing metal in we've in front of people who couldn't account for where they got the medal and we're asking for a voluntary notification on the part of scrapyards when suspicious things are brought to them so we're trying to work with them right now i mean but again the regulations are are fairly weak but this is one area there's a lot of talk when the economy started to go sour about its effect on the crime rate and it didn't appear to have an immediate effect my sense all along was that you know unemployed factory workers weren't suddenly going to become robbers and burglars i think that still holds true but what i do think can happen is that the margins if a particular form of property crime can generate income you're going to see a spike in that at a time like this and i think that's what's happened with the price of scrap metal i think that's a that's very clearly driving our increases in burglary and car thefts i mean our car thefts are still over 40 below what they were in 2007. still good news big picture but we've seen a real correlation between the price of metal theft and the gradual increase of burglary and car theft you know we're grateful to see the continued overall decrease in aggravated assaults we're pleased to see a decrease in homicides i mean the 20-year average in homicides before 2007 was 127 homicides a year that was the average for 20 years for the last four years that average has been 81. so we're making some progress but the fact remains that overwhelmingly homicide still remains a lifestyle issue just so far this year we've had 14 homicides and of those 14 homicide victims 11 had criminal records and what we see is time and time again in the world of aggravated assault in the world of homicide that so much of our violence is driven by people who've made bad choices in terms of who they're going to hang out with and the activities in which they're going to engage the other thing that's remained clear to us on the homicide front is that the biggest percentage of homicides nearly 25 percent of homicides derive from arguments and fights and you know there's too many guns out there in the hands of those who shouldn't have them and all too often altercations are turning into somebody reaches for a gun and somebody gets shot so that remains a problem for us and you know we try to deal with that phenomenon particularly if it's connected to licensed premises by by writing up the bars or working with them to to check on who their client the clientele they attract but these explosive acts of violence based on a sudden confrontation are very difficult for us to get ahead of so we keep an eye on that one other thing we've noticed with robberies is that the last year something on the order of 30 of our robbery arrests were juveniles many of them were first offenders this is very unusual and we're keeping an eye on it because it seems like the first offense for juveniles is becoming more serious and it's unusual to see a first offense for a juvenile to be something on the order of a of a robbery which is a violent street crime so that is something we're paying attention to and we believe the new the new executive order coming out of the county in which we'll be given access to what juveniles are on probation will help us do a better job accounting for the behaviors of young people who are on supervision they've started to convey the information to us we're still working on the best way to get it into the street rapidly in november we had 480 robberies i mean that was like 150 more than the average month it accounted for almost all of the year's increase we saw it occur we jumped on it we redeployed and in december we were down to 180. so a rapid deployment in response to data analysis can have an impact we were we were amazed where we didn't couldn't imagine where it came from just suddenly we had this dramatic spike we were able to respond to it i think you saw almost immediately the trend you know revert based on our activity but the fact is that simply one month out of the 12 could basically account for the entire robbery increase for the year just tells you how volatile statistics can be as you try to uh use them to guide our activities