The Truth Staff
Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz and Toledo Police Department Chief Mike Troendle held a press conference last week to announce a dramatic improvement in the city’s year-to-date crime statistics.
“This is the biggest news story of the year,” said the mayor opening the press conference. “It’s pure newsworthiness, the fact that crime is so dramatically down.”
Crime, for the first half of the year, is indeed dramatically down. With the exception of auto thefts, other categories show huge improvement over the last two years – a return to pre-pandemic levels.
Burglaries in the first half are down 9.6 percent; robberies down 33 percent, theft from motor vehicles down 35 percent, people shot down 28 percent. The key statistic is homicides. In 2022 for the first six months of the year, there were 24 homicides in the city. This year, there have been 16, a drop of 33 percent.
“Homicides are down across the country,” noted Kapszukiewicz. “The decline is part of a more encouraging national trend but we are well above the national pace.”
The mayor attributed the drop to a plan put together by the administration and TPD at the time Chief Troendle was appointed to his position in 2022. “Our approach has been to develop a plan” to deal with the violence issue an stick to iy, he said.
Some of the elements of that plan included: beautifying neighborhoods, investing in youth (as much as $4 million, he noted), eliminating blight, attracting business development and improving housing stability.
“Our plan seems to be working, we are returning to a pre-pandemic norm,” said Kapszukiewicz.
Troendle also touted the newly released statistics but also added that “controlling crime is bigger and the police department.” He said that the “state of the city” as such conditions as blight improve helps to lower incidents of crime. The chief also said that TPD is trying to emphasize ways to get officers closer to the community through such methods as increased bicycle patrols and re-introducing foot patrols.
Additionally, “we want to be more proactive in addressing nuisance crimes which is directly related to the reduction of homicides.”
The “rest of the system is catching up,” added Troendle, explaining for example that the courts held “more homicide trials this month than before.”
The mid-year stats are not required reporting for the city to any other government entity but Kapszukiewicz said that internally the numbers were helpful in possibly seeing how the year-end statistics might look.