Cracking the case

Local law enforcement keep close tabs on the health of their communities.

They try to allocate the resources they are given in the most efficient way possible, hoping to nip crime in the bud before it turns into a crime wave. They have to make tough decisions about how to spend their time investigating various crimes, too.

Fairfield Police Chief David Thomas said there are two different kinds of policing: proactive and reactive. Proactive enforcement involves being visible in the community in the hopes of deterring crime. It also means trying to snuff out the root problem, such as trying to identify the ringleader of a gang. Reactive enforcement refers to responding to crimes as they happen. Thomas said the department does all they can to practice proactive law enforcement. He said the department hires investigators with a proactive attitude.

'Our investigators don't have to answer calls, so they can spend more time investigating the big crimes,” he said. 'If you arrest just one individual when you respond to a crime, that's not as effective as getting all 10 of them involved after a yearlong investigation.”

Thomas said he understands when the community hears of a crime, they want the police to make an arrest right away.

'They want immediate justice,” Thomas said. 'They think the quicker the arrest, the better for the community, but it's actually just the opposite.”

Thomas said he reminds his officers that they 'live in a great country” that believes all suspects are innocent until proven guilty. 'We have to meet a high standard to take away their freedom,” Thomas said. 'We can't rush to make an arrest. We have to look at all the evidence and build a case. It may take a bit longer, but we can present to the court a stronger case in the hopes the victim does not have to testify. When we rush to arrest, we tend to have less evidence available to try the case.”

Washington Police Chief Jim Lester said he feels police put as much time trying to prevent crime as they do into solving crime. He said that his department's investigator is primarily tasked with investigating crimes against persons, such as domestic assaults and child abuse.

'We've recently been working on a narcotics investigation to take the load off our investigator,” Lester said.

Lester said crimes against a person, like an assault that causes an injury, are given priority over property crimes.

'We investigate property crimes as well, like if a car or a home has been broken into,” Lester said. 'Unfortunately, a lot of times, there are no witnesses to property crimes. We canvas the neighborhood and find out nobody was aware of anything out of the ordinary. It makes it tough to do follow-up investigations.”

The Division of Criminal Investigation lab puts limits on the forensic evidence it's willing to test. Since its lab covers the whole state, it's performing tests on murders, rapes, and armed robberies across Iowa.

'If there's a property crime with less than $500 in damages, it's a simple misdemeanor, and the DCI is not going to spend a lot of resources trying to get DNA from fingerprints because they need to devote their resources to sexual assault and other major crimes,” Lester said.

Mt. Pleasant Police Chief Lyle Murray said there can be a number of obstacles that stand in the way of solving a crime. So much depends on the evidence left behind, on whether there were witnesses, and the willingness of victims to cooperate.

'I think in Mt. Pleasant, we have been very fortunate for some of our major cases having people step forward and help out,” Murray said. 'Most residents here do not want that type of behavior and are a valuable asset in helping us have a good success rate in charging people.”

Perhaps the largest obstacle is when law enforcement is faced with finding evidence about a criminal gang from outside the area and which locals know little about.

'We have had groups come in from out of state, and as nobody knows them, it makes it much harder to charge them,” Murray said. 'We have had lots of groups come in and, with lots of help, we've been able to charge them and arrest them. It's always nice to get the ring leader but that usually involves people cooperating, and that doesn't happen very much. Even when they tell us everything, we may still not have enough to charge the person responsible.”

Murray said that processing forensic evidence requires patience. It's sent to the DCI lab, and sometimes law enforcement agencies have to wait a year for the results to come back. Once law enforcement have collected enough evidence to charge a person, they turn their findings over to the county attorney's office to start a court case, and that could take a year or more before it is finally resolved.

Crime at the national level

Across the country, crime has heavily decreased in the last quarter-century. Statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that violent crime fell 51 percent from 1993 to 2008. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, which surveys approximately 160,000 Americans 12 and older whether they were victims of crime, reported an even greater drop in violent crime - 71 percent - in those 25 years. (Violent crime consists of homicide, rape, aggravated assault and robbery.)

Property crime has enjoyed a similarly steep decline, though more common than violent crime. In 1993, a little over one-third of households reported to the BJS they were victims of property crime, but that number fell to just 10 percent in 2018.

Iowa crime

Though the national crime rate has plummeted, Iowa's crime rate has been stable for the past 30 years. For most of that time, Iowa's violent crime rate has been 280 violent crimes per 100,000 people. Though it hasn't dropped in the last few decades, Iowa's violent crime rate still is below the national average. In 2018, the rate of violent crime in Iowa was about 34 percent lower than the country as a whole.

Iowa ranks 36th in violent crime rate, meaning it's safer than most states. The state with the lowest rate of violent crime is Maine (112 violent crimes per 100,000 people), while the most violent state is Alaska (885 violent crimes per 100,000 people).

County level crime

Washington, Henry and Jefferson counties all see violent crime rates below the national average. According to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Jefferson County's violent crime rate has been low for more than a decade, even less than half the state average. Henry County has been near the state average during that time, though figures released in 2016 show its crime rate is dipping below the average. Washington County's violent crime rate is slightly higher than the state average, and slightly higher than it was in the late 2000s.