The hullabaloo last week over the announcement that crime in Davenport rose nearly 16 percent in the first six months of 2002 ignores a more troubling trend in the city: Crime in Davenport has been on the rise since 1998, and the police department to this point can only guess at the causes.

At a Public Safety Committee meeting on October 10, Davenport Police Chief Mike Bladel downplayed the 2002 increase, noting that 64 percent - 1,155 incidents - of the increase was attributable to property crimes, specifically "undefined thefts," thefts from motor vehicles, and shoplifting. "It is the minor thefts that have gone up the most," said Lieutenant Dennis Kern, the city's new crime analyst.

It's worth noting, though, that violent crimes were also up in the first half of the year, with a 3-percent increase (representing roughly 50 additional crimes from January through June). The crime statistics are drawn from "index crimes" - serious crimes that are annually reported to the federal government under the Uniform Crime Reporting program. (Index crimes include murders, assaults, larcenies/thefts, forced sex offenses, robberies, burglaries, and motor-vehicle thefts.)

Kern, in his presentation to the city-council committee, cautioned against making a big deal of the 2002 increase. "You can overemphasize a trend," he said. "We have not hit our historic highs."

But the 2002 numbers - which were derived from comparing index crimes in the first six months this year to the first six months of 2001 - are clearly part of a larger trend.

Crime in Davenport was steady in the early 1990s but began dropping in 1996. It hit a low point in 1998 but has been climbing ever since, and if this year's trend holds, crime in 2002 will reach its highest level in at least 12 years, 3 percent higher than in 1991.

In an interview with the River Cities' Reader, Kern - a 26-year veteran of Davenport Police Department - was at first at a loss to explain the four-year upswing in crime. "At this point I can't really pinpoint it," he said.

Kern hypothesized that the increase might be the result of a faltering economy. The rising numbers are probably a function of both more crime and increased reporting. The increase in the number of reported property crimes might be attributable in part to people being more nervous about their financial security. Thefts of smaller items are "losses that people won't take," unlike in the past, he said. For example, while replacing a stolen bike in the past might have cost less than $100, now most bikes cost hundreds of dollars.

But Kern also allows that more thefts are occurring. If the economy is a factor, that could be discerned by analyzing crime statistics in the context of unemployment and income in the area. "What are the thefts fueling?" he asked. "You're doing something with the money." People could be buying food with the proceeds of their crime, or they might be buying drugs.

But that would suggest that crime is going up all over the Quad Cities.

When the River Cities' Reader explored the first signs of an increase in crime two years ago (see "Is Crime Back?" Issue 290, September 27, 2000), the increase in crime in Davenport was counter to both national and local trends. Across the country and in other parts of the Quad Cities, crime was still dropping, a function of a strong economy.

Davenport's recent history is still outside of national trends. Preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Justice showed a crime increase of 2.0 percent from 2000 to 2001. For the same period in Davenport, crime increased 13.2 percent.

Kern said he's made initial inquiries with other Quad Cities police departments to see if Davenport's crime increase is part of a regional trend or an anomaly. "I have a couple calls in to find that out," he said. "I haven't found a satisfactory answer."

In Moline, crime has continued to drop steadily in recent years. In 2001, index crime plummeted 12.5 percent from 2000 levels - from 2,272 incidents to 1,987, according to numbers provided by the Moline Police Department. And from 1998 to 2001, crime fell 25 percent. In Bettendorf, crime dropped 9.7 percent last year, and 13.3 percent from 1998 to 2001, according to statistics from the Bettendorf Police Department. That would suggest that increased crime is more of a Davenport than a Quad Cities problem.

(The City of Rock Island would not release its crime statistics without a Freedom of Information Act request, which the River Cities' Reader will soon submit. Kern said he didn't have comparative data from Rock Island. He added that among the Quad Cities, Rock Island is the city most similar to Davenport in terms of its crime.)

Eventually, Kern suggested that internal problems within the Davenport Police Department could be a significant factor in the increase in crime over the past four years. The department has dealt with some scandal, but more importantly it had a rash of retirements in recent years and had difficulty getting new officers on the street.

In April 2001, Davenport's street-ready force was only 84.4 percent of the department's authorized strength of 160. Those 25 vacant positions represented the equivalent of having five beat cars off-duty at all times. (The city's current street-ready force is roughly 92 percent, Bladel said.)

The officers currently on the street also have much less experience. Bladel said that from January 1999 to September 2002, Davenport has sworn in 49 new officers - nearly one-third of its authorized strength.

"When you're tying to fight a survival game, you don't do much proactive work," Kern said.

He also said that the department is now focusing on matters outside itself, such as the boost in crime. "Given some of the problems we've had in the past ... we've made some progress," he said. "Instead of looking at problems strictly in the department ... we are starting to look at how we can better service the calls."

In addition to short-staffing, the Davenport Police Department has also had to deal with scandal. Former Sergeant Greg Collins was accused of stealing thousands of dollars of property seized during vice cases. In September, Collins pleaded guilty to a minor theft charge as part of an agreement with prosecutors, and in August, he was convicted on a federal weapons charge.

Bladel said that a rising crime rate could be attributed in part to a now-growing confidence in the police department. "If a community does not have confidence in its law-enforcement agency, it's not going to report all its crime," he said.

Concern about increasing crime was spurred by the July drive-by shooting of nine-year-old Deanna Shipp. In August, Bladel said in a memo to City Administrator Craig Malin that based on the first six months of 2002, crime in Davenport was expected to increase less than 2 percent. That prompted Mayor Charlie Brooke to chastise members of the city council about creating negative perceptions of the city by claiming a dramatic increase in crime.

Bladel explained to the River Cities' Reader that he had simply doubled the six-month crime data from 2002 and compared it to 2001 year-end totals. The analysis presented to the city council last week compared the first six months of 2002 with the first six months of 2001. "Math isn't my strong suit, apparently," Bladel said.

The Davenport Police Department has taken a number of steps to address the increase in crime. Bladel said the department is re-establishing an "anti-street-crime presence" by putting plainclothes officers in unmarked cars on the street.

The department is also within a few weeks of putting out its "mobile precinct system" that will establish a short-term police presence in areas with crime problems.

A major tool will be the two-week-old crime-analyst position, which Bladel said was something the command staff had identified as a need in March.

Bladel said that once the department has the ability to produce up-to-date crime statistics (instead of just churning out an annual report), "we can use this [the crime-analyst post] in a real-time process. ... [We can] use crime analysis as a tool to direct our resources [telling us] not where the crime has been but where it's going to be."

But because the position is so new, Kern hasn't had much opportunity to crunch the numbers. He can't yet say where in the city the largest crime increases have occurred. "I'm way too early into this," he said.

"My job is to see if we can do a faster job of isolating who's doing it" and intervening earlier to prevent crime, Kern said. "We don't want to set new records. We're not in the direction we want. My job is to drive those numbers down."

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