Police Chief: Providence Was Doing Well, Then Recession Hit

Police Chief: Providence Was Doing Well, Then Recession Hit

Crime in Providence was heading down, but then economy soured and the city hit a bump in the road, according to Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief.

In 2002, there were 14,039 incidents. That fell to 9,821 by 2007, thanks in large part to a community approach to policing that Esserman said he instituted when he arrived as police chief.

But then in 2008, crime went back up to 10,424, according to department data Esserman provided to GoLocalProv.

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Esserman said two crimes increased significantly between 2007 and 2008: burglaries and robberies. Burglaries jumped from 1,746 incidents to 2,026 incidents, as a result of offenders breaking into foreclosed homes that had been abandoned. Most of the people breaking into those homes, Esserman said, were after the copper used in heating systems.

Robberies, meanwhile shot up from 392 cases to 523 between those two years. Nearly a third of those, however, were instances of teenagers stealing cell phones from other kids, according to Esserman.

New Way of Counting Crimes

It didn’t help that in 2008 the department switched over to a mandatory new system of reporting its crime data to the FBI, which compiles annual reports from across the country.

For example, before 2008, a robbery committed against a group of three people at the same time was counted as a single incident. But starting that year, the robbery would actually have been counted as three incidents because there three victims involved, according to Esserman.

As a result of the new system, 2008 crimes reported to the FBI showed increases across the board.

Crime Rates on a Rollercoaster

Nonetheless, even by the older method of counting, there were still increases in burglaries and robberies—and Esserman said his department took quick action to clamp down on the rising crime wave. “We got on top of it and in ‘09 in went down,” Esserman said. “But in ’09 we had a new problem.”

That problem was a sharp increase in murders, which went from 13 to 24 incidents, between 2008 and 2009, according to department records. “We went from zero to eight domestic murders in one year,” Esserman said.

He said the stresses of the recession was a “contributing cause” in the upswing.

“It really is the story of a city who the economy hit hard in vacant buildings and families,” Esserman said.

As a result, he said his department again responded swiftly, forming a task force of officers, social workers, victims that has been meeting every other week since January to review domestic violence reports and intervene before they turn deadly.

So far, he said murders are down in the first five months of 2010.

“Behind every statistic, there is a story—these are people,” Esserman told GoLocalProv last night as he was on his way to visit a shooting victim and his family in the hospital.