Trenton Suffers Higher Crime After Police Layoffs

When it comes to the layoff of law enforcement professionals the idea is never a popular one for one simple fact. No matter what city or town you happen to live in you know that fewer officers on the ground means that there will be more crimes that go unsolved. After all it is not like the criminals are going to layoff an equal number of criminal in order to keep the peace.  As a matter of fact it is likely that there will more more criminal activity, as those people likely to commit crimes as they feel like there is a decreasing chance that they will actually be caught in the act.
The latest city who is facing serious problems for cutting police officers is the city of Trenton, New Jersey. They made layoffs to their police force back in September of 2011, getting rid of a total of 105 officers and demoting others. The cut of 105 officers was about a third of the police force. They made mass layoffs and some serious demotions to their staff in order to make ends meet.  Well it looks like making ends meet has led to some serious upticks in crime.
Information released by the Trenton police showed an increase in crimes of most kinds. The data, which compares the data in 15 weeks increments in the city of Trenton has shown some interesting increases. Overall crime, when compared to the same period in the year before, has increased by about 15.6 percent.
What does that mean in real numbers? Well between the first of January 2012 and the 10th of April in the same year 987 crimes have been reporter to the police in Trenton. For the same period in 2011 there were only 854 crimes reported. The majority of the increase was in the way of robberies and other kinds of thefts. On the bright side there has been a decrease in violent crimes. So while you are likely to lose stuff you are less likely to lose your life.
Of course, this is not the fist study of its time to be done in The Garden State after law enforcement layoffs here is a look at some of our earlier coverage  on the issue. For those of you who missed out on it here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all: “While the analysis did not break things down by specific crimes it did talk about crimes in categories. So lets take a look at what kinds of crimes are actually going unpunished.
In Newark, between the months of January 2009 and November 2010 the average number of violations marked at “other”, which includes things like noise complaints and curfew violations, were given about 5,100 times a month. Since the layoffs that number has been about 2,600 a month. That is slightly more than half of the number of violations as before the layoffs.
While this one may seem innocuous, numbers in other cities show a different tale. In Camden a noticeable hit came in the form of traffic violations. The number of tickets issued for moving violations, such as speeding and running stoplights, dropped from 3,820 before the layoffs to 1,850 after the layoffs. In Paterson the numbers tell an even more sinister tale. The number of arrests for shoplifting or having a personal use amount of drugs dropped from a little more than 700 each month to about 545 each month after the layoffs.
It is important to note that most of these changes did not happen immediately after the layoffs. In the case of Patterson the drop data average is from five months after the layoffs. So right now all this report shows is correlation, not causality.”