Harlan Kirgan
There probably isn’t too may bright spots to be noted for the COVID-19 year, but Eunice Police statistics show the virus put a damper on arrests and traffic cases.
Police Chief Randy Fontenot mused at Tuesday’s Board of Aldermen’s meeting, “Maybe we need to put the entire city under house arrest again to keep these numbers down.”
Fontenot went over the statistics for everything from crash reports to DWI arrests to felony arrests that are mostly the lowest in nine years.
The crime counts have been on the decrease recent years, he said.
“The numbers have been looking pretty good as far the crime rates in Eunice and FBI stats that we had gotten back in October, but the big drop that we had in 2020, I think a lot of that was whenever we went into the lockdown period,” he aid.
“It basically died,” he said. “Even our responses to complaints that we were getting at the police department and everything just dropped tremendously when we went into lockdown,” he said.
After the meeting Fontenot said, “I’m not going to say all of it, but I will attribute a lot of it to the COVID because when we went on the stay at home order ... our traffic in town for about a month or so went way down. Even after that it never picked back up to where it was prior.”
Fontenot presented a chart of the 2020 crime stats and there were 8,301 complaints, which is 2,739 below the average since 2012 of 11,040. That’s a 24.8% reduction compared to the average. The 2019 complaint total was 10,110.
Other 2020 statistics compared to the average since 2012 include:
— Crash reports, 263, down 111 or 29.7%.
— Adult traffic citations, 534, down 219 or 29%.
— Juvenile traffic citations, 30, up 16 or 114.3%.
— Adult criminal summons, 51, down 16 or 23.9%.
— Juvenile criminal summons, 9, up 3 or 50%.
— Adult misdemeanor arrests, 255, down 43 or 14.4%.
— Juvenile misdemeanor arrests, 51, down 9 or 15%.
— DWI arrests, 5, down 35 or 87.5%.
— Felony arrests, 271, down 62 or 20.8%.
— Arrests for other departments, 271, down 9 or 3.2%.
Fontenot suspects the drop in DWI arrests in 2020 can be linked to bars being shutdown and people staying at home.
But Fontenot also attributed it to good police work. The department has been shorthanded and used overtime to cover shifts. That meant more experienced officers have been on duty more often, he said.
“They’ve been very aggressive with their patrolling. I think that may play a little part in it too as well,” he said.
The experienced officers know the people and their routines, he said.
There was a period after Hurricane Laura when traffic in Eunice increased, but that resulted in more crashes on private property, he said. Those statistics are not available.
For the hurricane-damaged areas to the west, Eunice was one of the first places people could find fuel, food and other supplies.
Fontenot said he is curious about what is going to happen in 2021 with the statistics.