Violent crime on the rise in Lorain County

Overall crime is down in Lorain County, but violent offenses are on the rise, according to County Prosecutor Dennis Will.

The county is following the national trend, Will said.

“Most of the major cities in a certain belt, their offenses of violence, especially shootings,

homicides, things like that, are going up,” he said.

Will supplied statistics to The Morning Journal relating to criminal cases which were completed in 2017. He did not supply the total number of cases filed in 2017

The statistics show 4,234 criminal cases were resolved and 31 involved a death.

Of those resolutions, six convictions were by trial and 25 were by plea, statistics show.

Also, there were 22 indictments in 2017 for offenses involving someone’s death.

Two of the cases were capital murder, 10 were homicides or murders, four were vehicular homicides and six were reckless or involuntary manslaughters involving drug overdoses, Will said.

The county had 113 indictments on 178 felonious assault charges. Those led to 37 convictions on 57 charges, Will said.

As for drug cases, the county saw 23 indictments for first- or second-degree

felony trafficking with 26 charges. Of those, there were two convictions on two charges which were all pleas.

Also, the county had 20 indictments on first- or second-degree felony possession of drugs. Of those, three were convicted on four were disposed of by plea.

Will said he believes part of the rise in violent crime may be connected with the drop in lowerlevel offenses.

“Some of it may be that the people who were committing those (lower-level) offenses before have risen to a higher level of offense,” he said. “We have much more violence in juvenile cases. We have 24 pending defendants on cases of aggravated murder, attempted murder and murder.

“That is not including all the aggravated vehicular homicides and things like that and those just keep going up. Every week, we get more and more of those.”

Child abuse cases also are on the rise, Will said.

“Those types of cases have escalated tremendously,” he said.

Will also attributes the

rise in violent crime to the opioid epidemic, economic depression and the fall of the nuclear family.

The increase in highlevel violent crime cases is putting strain on both his office and the local pool of defense attorneys, he said.

“They take a lot more time, a lot more resources,” Will said. “They take longer to get tried because we have a limited number of defense attorneys that are, either physically capable at the time, or qualified to try those cases.

“That is driving the process right now.”

Lorain County is not alone in this predicament, he said.

Will said he’s been in contact with prosecutors from nearby counties and they described similar situations.

Another factor is the implementation of Targeted Community Alternatives to Prison, or T-CAP, by the state government, he said.

T-CAP seeks to keep those convicted of lowlevel — fourth- or fifth-degree — felonies out of the prison system.

This leads to tension with the local law enforcement which perceives the county judges and prosecutors

as being soft on these offenders, Will said.

This initiative and others reduced the prison population slightly, but in recent years, it has begun to increase, he said.

“It skyrocketed because, in my opinion, because of the opioid epidemic,” Will said. “So, they’re right back where they started.

“There are over 50,000 people in the prison system. All these initiatives that they used before and all these changes didn’t do anything.

“And now they’re going to do this justice reinvestment initiative again to analyze where we’re at.”

The justice reinvestment initiative involves the state bringing in an outside contractor to look at the numbers in the Ohio criminal justice system and will recommend better ways to use funding, Will said.

He said he doesn’t hold out much hope for the initiative. He said he also believes they will recommend not sending thirddegree felony offenders to prison.

“That’s all well and good, except that hasn’t worked for them so far,” Will said.