RECENT COMMENTS
End of Year report for Sector 111
Lt.Minton’s Sector 111 January/End of Year report (PDF) is now available. Sector 111 encompasses Church Hill, Chimborazo, Church Hill North, Fulton, Oakwood, and Union Hill:
Happy New Year,
Violent crime for the year was down by –8%. Homicides were down by –50% in the sector. The two homicides occurred at 27th and Q street and on Old Nicholson Road in Historic Fulton. These have both been cleared by arrest. Commercial Robberies were up from 3 to 6 with the majority of them cleared by arrest. Individual Robberies were down by –15% and Home Invasions were down by –43%. Aggravated Assaults were down by –5% and we cleared 100% of the Aggravated Assault Domestics.
Property crime for the year was down by –2%. We had 10 more burglaries than we did last year. We had a significant reduction in auto thefts, down by –49% from 47 to 24. Our increase in vehicle related thefts came from the theft of mopeds. We went from 22 to 30. Total crime for the sector was down by –3%. We ended the year with 666 total crimes. In relation to other sectors, this is one of the lowest total amounts out of the twelve sectors.
We enjoyed a lot of successes this year due to citizens keeping a watchful eye and reporting what they saw to us. There are several people serving lengthy prison sentences due to this relationship between the community and the police department. As many of you know, I post a lot of information on the Church Hill Peoples News. Most of the time this information is well received and positive results often come from the postings. I do make every attempt to take the information that is received via social media and mold our crime fighting strategies around it.
This year we started a couple different email chains with various neighborhoods and this has worked well for all who have been involved. Feel free to email me if you would like to be included in an email chain that encompasses where you live. The bigger email chains currently cover Church Hill and Fulton, but there are other neighborhoods involved as well. We also work closely with Henrico County Police department as far as sharing information and combating crime trends. Criminals now no boundaries and we take notice of this.
Lets talk a little about New Years Eve, I read a lot of different posts online to include that RPD was an epic failure. I can tell you there were only two violent crimes that occurred on New Year’s Eve, that’s city wide. There were no shootings. There weren’t any violent crimes in sector 111.
There are a lot of suggestions on how to curb the gunfire on New Year’s Eve. I will leave you with this, shooting a gun into the air is a class 1 misdemeanor which is the same punishment that reckless driving carries…
As always thank you for the hard work you, the citizens, contribute to helping us make sector 111 a safer place to live and work!
Lieutenant Daniel S. Minton
240-9158 (Direct Number)
646-0574 (Office Number)
Here’s an idea – why not find a big open field somewhere and legalize shooting guns up in the air there? Make it the Hamsterdam of shooting.
Guns must be shot straight upwards so the bullets don’t leave the airspace above the field but otherwise it’s fully legal to celebrate major holidays by blasting off dozens of rounds.
Maybe that will get the message out to the knucklehead community. The current approach doesn’t seem to be working.
I think what Lt. Minton is perhaps suggesting is that there needs to be a stronger penalty for shooting a gun. When someone shoots a gun, there is an inherent intent to harm or kill a person or damage property.
It is great that nobody got killed on New Years Eve but I think claiming that as a victory is a little bit of a stretch. That it happened at all, let alone every single year, is never going to be acceptable. Pointing out successes in other areas doesn’t undo what happened here.