Fairfield police: Calls for service way down in 2020

FAIRFIELD – Data from the Fairfield Police Department show calls for service in 2020 were the lowest they've been in 10 years.

In fact, crimes of all types were well below average, everything from theft to assault to drunk driving.

Fairfield Police Chief David Thomas said it's quite likely crime was indeed lower than normal in 2020, owing in part to businesses being closed and more people staying at home. At the same time, he cautioned against reading too much into the statistics because the department trained five new officers last year.

'There were probably a lot of calls that the newer officers forgot to tell dispatch to initiate,” Thomas said.

But Thomas doesn't think that's the whole story. Calls for service averaged 10,241 from 2011-2020, but in that final year they were just 8,063. Thomas said the new officers might have missed some calls but not 2,000 of them. He thinks there were genuinely fewer calls than normal.

The police chief noted that crime tends to dip in the winter when people have less contact with each other. He said the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic made for a year-long winter of sorts as it kept people indoors.

The department made 296 arrests in 2020, down from its 10-year average of 496. Burglaries were nearly half their average, with 54 being reported compared to an average of 94. Thomas said crimes like burglaries can fluctuate widely from year to year because they're usually done by a handful of small groups. If police can catch them, the number of burglaries can drop substantially.

'I'd say a majority of those 54 burglaries were committed by a couple of groups of two to three people,” Thomas said. 'And we see that juveniles are mostly the ones committing burglaries.”

Thefts had been trending up for a few years and peaked at 253 in 2019, but fell to just 167 in 2020. Acts of vandalism, which average 76 per year, were down, too, at 54. Charges of operating while intoxicated, which average 64 per year, were 48 in 2020.

Thomas said officers were given explicit instructions to handle cases over the phone if possible to avoid unnecessary in-person contact. He said not all calls to the police are counted in the 'calls for service.” Only those that pertain to a crime are counted. For instance, Thomas said dispatchers and officers field calls from people seeking legal advice, which the officers can't give. In that case, the police direct that person to an attorney.

Traffic accidents were below normal in 2020, with 199 compared to the average of 224. Traffic stops were well below average at 1,082 compared to an average of 1,778, and citations were less than half the average number at 332 citations in 2020 compared to an average of 698.

Thomas said he was surprised to receive messages from federal authorities about how fatal accidents increased in 2020. He suspects that much of the increase in fatal collisions occurred in big cities where, because fewer people were on the road resulting in less bumper-to-bumper traffic, motorists drove faster than normal and thus caused worse accidents.

Fairfield does not have congestion problems like bigger cities, so the main effect of the pandemic on traffic patterns was to simply reduce the number of vehicles on the road, which is why the city saw fewer accidents, fewer traffic stops and fewer citations.

Though not yet set in stone, the Fairfield City Council is poised to approve expanding the department's staff from 14 to 15 officers. Thomas said the department once had 15 officers about 20 years ago, but has been at 14 since 2010. However, a bigger challenge regarding staff is getting officers to stick around once they've been trained. The five new officers in 2020 is the most the department has had to train in one year.

'A couple of years ago, we had to train three, and that was a lot for us,” Thomas said. 'Our department has become a stepping stone for other agencies.”

Thomas said the amount of turnover has been disheartening because it takes newly trained officers seven months before they can work on their own (four months at the academy and three months of ride-alongs). When the department is short staffed, the other officers have to work on their days off to cover all the shifts.