Crime in unincorporated Porter County was down overall for 2015 compared to 2014, according to statistics released by the Porter County Sheriff’s Department.
That included an almost 10 percent drop in felonies and a more than 24 percent drop in drunken driving arrests. Even crashes dropped by almost 8 percent.
Having a low crime rate is a quality of life issue, said Commissioner Laura Blaney, D-South.
“When you add the consistently strong efforts of our policing agencies, the increased vigilance in the fight against drugs, and innovative courts like the drug and veterans courts to a lower unemployment rate you end up with the safe community you’re looking for,” she said. “There are a lot of people working together to make this happen.”
There were two murders in unincorporated parts of the county in 2015 after there were none in 2013 and 2014. The murders, said Sheriff David Reynolds, were not random and were directly related to domestic violence.
“I never really put too much on the stats,” he said. “We need to be cognizant of what the problem is in the county and almost all of the crime we do have is directly related to drugs, and the main drug is heroin.”
Drugs, particularly heroin, continue to be a challenge for the county, and the county had 32 total drug overdoses and seven deaths attributed to overdoses last year, with six of those deaths tied directly to heroin, Reynolds said.
That was down from 11 heroin deaths in 2014.
The county formed the Heroin Overdose Response Team last year to investigate all overdoses, and every officer is equipped with the heroin antidote Naloxone, which saved 17 lives in the county’s service area in 2015.
Education is the answer to fighting drug use, Reynolds said, noting the public service video his department released last year and is showing to schools throughout the county about the heroin epidemic. The video interviews inmates of the Porter County Jail about their heroin use and families who lost loved ones to the drug.
“I think that’s important. It’s a different approach because what we’ve done in the past isn’t working,” he said.
In recent weeks the department introduced a new app for smartphone users that offers alerts about police activity, as well as the opportunity to provide crime tips on the go. If an alert went out about a kidnapped child with a license plate number for the suspect’s car, people in the county could notify police if they spotted the suspect, Reynolds said.
Crime statistics are important because they’re newsworthy, Reynolds said, “but I think the big news is, what are you doing in our county to keep us safe.”
Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
