2020 Crime Clock Released
The 2020 Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Data has been released by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) allowing the Parsons Police Department to construct our 2020 Crime Clock in order to present it to the citizens of Parsons. 2020 showed some increases in a few areas of our crime statistics and also some decreases in areas as well.
Parsons witnessed less Rapes in 2020 along with far less Burglary and Motor Vehicle Theft reports. Arson occurrences dropped by one, but there was an increase in Aggravated Assaults and Batteries. The violent crime increase was driven by a growth in Domestic Violence cases. The overall uptick in the violent crime rate in Parsons is in line with the trends that the State of Kansas is seeing across the board.
Parsons Police Chief Robert Spinks says "putting our per capita crime rate aside we are ranked 18th in the state of Kansas for violent crime and 26th in the state for actual reported UCR crimes. Per capita numbers are great but can be impacted when the daytime population increases each day in a city like Parsons. People travel to Parsons to work, visit, or shop. I feel confident in saying that Parsons is still one of the safest communities in the area to live in. We have a unique socio-economic mix, and we are seeing a decrease in population, but an increase in offender population moving to Parsons. This can be attributed to other communities tearing down housing due to natural disasters or condemning buildings."
"Taking the UCR Data released by the KBI and comparing our city to others is a real eye opener", according to Sergeant Jason Ludwig. "There are some local agencies that would normally be a good comparison to Parsons that don't even report their statistics to the KBI, some agencies only report a summary of their collected data."
"When looking into some of our calls and crimes reported to the state, the majority of violent crime reports taken are offender on offender crimes and the next largest chunk is domestic violence cases. In 2020 the Parsons Police Department took reports for 176 Domestic Violence cases. Out of the 93 violent crimes reported to the state 24, were felony level domestic cases. In Parsons, 26% of violent crime is domestic violence related. This is a community failure, "said Spinks. "It will take a community investment in time and effort to change this historic failure. We will discuss this issue with our Public Safety Advisory Board this week.
Spinks continued, "If we could stem the flow of Domestic Violence in our community through programs in social services or faith-based services the reported crime rate would be negligible."
The 2020 Crime Clock shows real time numbers to the community on the departments calls and frequency of crimes. Looking at some of the numbers that are displayed on the Crime Clock the city has a rate of 1 property crime every 21 hours. This ranges from a simple theft case to a burglary or vehicle theft or even a shoplifter. Every 5 days we respond to a violent crime and that can be anything from the 1 murder per year to an Aggravated Assault/ Battery that derives from a domestic dispute.
We believe that we can make this community better each year through partnerships with our community members and all services.
Chief Robert Spinks Speech on Domestic Violence PDF
# # # # #
