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Photo by Sarah Finnegan.
Mountain Brook police officers John Hodgens, left, and Ryan Butterworth drive through neighborhoods in Mountain Brook during an evening shift.
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In the past year, statistics for arrests by the Mountain Brook Police Department have fluctuated only slightly, but in the past five years, numbers have changed more dramatically.
Since his time as police chief, Ted Cook has helped grow the department from 52 officers to a fully staffed force of 58 officers. Cook said this ensures all patrols and beats are covered at all times, which has affected arrest numbers and increased the safety of the community.
“A few years ago, we were pretty short-handed, and we had to leave a beat open from time to time,” he said. “We’re getting to the point, again over this past year, we’re being able to put the extra folks out and about.”
By including more patrols, officers are more visible to criminals and are able to make more arrests, Cook said.
Drug arrests
During the past five years, the number of drug-related arrests has increased about 200 percent, from 26 made in 2011 to 83 in 2016.
“That stems from getting back to full staff,” Cook said. “There’ve been more arrests simply because we’ve maintained the number of personnel on the streets.”
Police make drug arrests for a variety of controlled substances: prescription pills, narcotics, synthetic drugs and drug paraphernalia, to name a few. But one of the most common is still marijuana.
“It’s probably the easiest one to obtain a probable cause on without actual sight because of the smell,” Cook said. “There’s a distinctive smell of marijuana, whether or not it’s just been packaged or smoked.”
Arrests are not as easy with other drugs, so Cook said officers are keeping active in the communities by making traffic stops and talking with suspects further to try to establish a probable cause that a crime has been committed or that property is connected with a crime. Sometimes, a probable cause can lead to arrests made for prescription drugs, which Cook called one of the city’s bigger problems.
While oftentimes the drug in question was not initially obtained illegally — some may be left over from a procedure or prescribed for ongoing treatment — prescription drugs can be used improperly if they fall into the wrong hands.
“A lot of these youth will get in there and get these pills and not know what they do,” Cook said. Some younger residents might not know the effect of the drugs if abused, but they take them anyway, he said.
To promote drug safety, the MBPD is heavily involved in All In Mountain Brook and has added a drug drop-box in its lobby to safely dispose of drugs, thanks to the help of the Vestavia Police Department as a part of the DEA National Take-Back Initiative.
While many drug arrests stem from sightand physical evidence, a quickly growing crime is one that can go unseen.
Identity theft
Cook calls identity theft one of the fastest-growing crimes, and since 2011, arrests have jumped from 31 in 2011 to 81 in 2016.
“It’s a lot easier to do now than it used to be. [With] just a little bit of technology and equipment, they [criminals] can download your identification to a cloned card in no time,” he said.
Cook said victims typically notice when looking at monthly statements and seeing abnormal charges, which affect every age group and can range from menial to outlandish.
“In some cases, it’s thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars,” he said.
The criminals get their data by “scanning” cards — debit or credit — and selling the data to a person who specializes in stolen identities. Sometimes, the identity that’s stolen may be from a child who wouldn’t know of the crime until he or she applies for a loan years down the road.
“If the bill is addressed somewhere else, it might not ever track back to the victim until they do something such as long-term credit,” Cook said.
To prevent identity theft, Cook suggested people monitor their credit lines and monthly statements for unexpected charges, and if they do notice something, to notify their bank and card companies as soon as possible.
“There’s an untold number of people sitting at a computer around the world, searching for a way to steal info from someone else,” he said.
Burglaries and theft
As some criminals sit behind a computer, others walk along the streets testing doors.
The overall numbers for burglaries and thefts have decreased, Cook said, but the past two to three years have brought a sharp increase in car break-ins — many from unlocked vehicles.
Cook said that in 2015, 87 percent of the car owners who reported something stolen were from unlocked vehicles, and that number is going to be fairly consistent across 2016. According to the weekly community updates sent by MBPD, there were eight guns reported stolen in 2016.
That doesn’t mean criminals are above smashing a window to steal items, he said, some of which may be credit cards that lead to arrests in identity theft cases. In 2016, one car window was smashed, and a gun was taken.
Police believe the thefts are coming from groups that drive to different areas, walk through communities at night testing door handles and going through cars for expensive items often left in plain sight.
“When those guys are moving down the street, if they see headlights coming down the street, they just pull off into the [shadows],” he said. “That’s one of the reasons it’s very difficult for our night patrol officers to see them.”
With an increasingly mobile society, Cook said it is becoming harder to catch criminals on all fronts.
“You can’t go round up the usual suspects now, because the usual suspects might be coming in from Birmingham, from Huntsville. Some folks are coming up from Mobile to break into our cars, because ‘they always have the good stuff,’” he said. “If you think about it, these guys know that certain parts of the community leave their doors unlocked … That would do a tremendous amount for us if we could just get people to lock doors.”
