PUTNAM COUNTY, Fla. – The Putnam County Sheriff’s Office celebrated the new year with an announcement about crime reduction in 2020.
The Sheriff’s Office is estimating a 25% reduction in crime overall with a 30% reduction in violent crime and 20% in non-violent crimes.
Now, those are only preliminary crime percentages for 2020 and it may take several months before the FDLE finalizes the data.
But the Sheriff’s Office still considers those numbers to be trending in the right direction.
Colonel Joe Wells says crime reduction in Putnam County has more to do with proactive policing as opposed to reactive policing.
It’s a model that focuses more on crime prevention.
According to preliminary crime data for Putnam County, the sheriff’s office only investigated three murders in 2020, one less than the year before. Wells says the preliminary data is also showing a 25% downward trend in domestic violence but cautions that percentage.
“There will always be studies for years to come to determine if that is accurate? Were people able to report domestic violence with the offender in the home at an increasing level due to COVID?” Wells said.
Col. Wells says non-violent crimes such as theft and burglary appear to be trending down, too. Wells says the reduction in overall crime for 2020 has more to do with the new crime-fighting models it has adopted.
“We’ve adopted what is known as the Stratified Crime Control strategy. We’re the third agency in the state of Florida to adopt it,” Wells said.
It’s a strategy that focuses more on crime prevention rather than reacting to a crime that could have been prevented. This model utilizes community policing as well as intelligence gathering to determine crime trends and how resources should be used to prevent the trends from becoming much worse.
Col. Wells says the intelligence is paying off.
“We have identified roughly 200 people that are responsible for the overwhelming majority of our crime,” he said.
And more than 100 of those people who were identified are now currently in jail or prison.
Col. Wells says those 100-plus people currently incarcerated will still be monitored after they are released to make sure they are not just getting back out and committing more crimes.
He says a lot of their crimes are the result of drug addiction.