Protsman:
Plummer:
Harrison Twp. had two homicides in 2015, and last year had four. So there’s definitely been an increase for everybody. Our numbers of auto crashes hasn’t been as bad. The problem everywhere, though, is money and drugs on the streets.
The opiate situation has been hitting outlying communities, but gun violence not as much. The Ronnie Bowers shooting last fall got a lot of attention, of course. Since I got here, we’ve been very proactive and so we’ve seen significant increase in drug arrests — those are up 119 percent, and we’ve finding more guns, too. It’s because we’re looking for them more now — making traffic stops, focusing on apartment complexes that we think are having an issue, working with apartment managers. Our Part 1 crimes dropped from 2015 to ’16, but Part 2 crimes — simple assault, drug crimes, lesser offenses — are up. Also, an increase in traffic accidents.
Q: Chief Biehl, you focused on that particular date in May 2015 as significant. Do you know why? Biehl:
No. We really studied
Plummer:
Sure — there’ve been car-to-car battles down some streets, down Main and Salem. You had a rolling gunbattle. There’s been an increase. It’s drug-related, gangs and crews with beefs against each other.
Or shots at a habitation. There’ve been children shot at a house. Multiple incidents over the years.
Biehl: Q: Over gang turf ? Biehl:
Some of that, but I wish it was really as simple as that, and it’s not. With the dozens of cases we looked at in 2015, we couldn’t come up with an explanation that you could attribute the largest portion to. There was no consistent theme. Some robberies, some drug-related, some personal beefs, some friend and family disputes. But it was it was across the board. If there was as simple answer we could be a lot more efficient and know what strategy to use. We could spend time in the places were crimes occur, we could have officer do meaningful engagement, focused engagement — we know what works.
Biehl:
We’re still at about 10 percent minority staffing.
Q: What would the goal be? Biehl:
Well, it will be difficult for the Dayton Police Department to ever have diversity that is larger than the county, which is roughly 20 percent, any time soon. Our labor force comes from the surrounding eight- or 10-county area, and outside
Protsman:
It’s not on our radar as being something that’s up.
It seems concentrated in some areas more than others, but that’s not necessarily a prevalence — it’s often because of certain living arrangements. Thin apartment walls allow people to hear what’s not heard in another kind of neighborhood. So you can’t say it just happens in
Biehl: