The weather’s warming up, businesses are beginning to open and some area police departments are getting busier.
COVID-19 is still impacting everyday life more than two months after Gov. Charlie Baker issued a stay-at-home advisory, but five local police departments are taking a retrospective look at call volumes and crime in their communities since mid-March and are assessing how their operations have fared so far. And while each department is different, some trends can be gleaned from their analyses.
“There’s just no experience in dealing with something like this, to this magnitude,” said Amherst Police Capt. Gabriel Ting. “I’ve learned a ton from it, and I think, down the line, the lessons that we learned from dealing with COVID-19 can certainly apply in other areas.”
“And who knows,” Ting added, “there might be another resurgence.”
As a “unique” college town community, Ting said, the Amherst Police Department in mid-March quickly realized it needed to craft its own, equally unique response to dealing with the novel coronavirus.
Officials at the department expected to see an increase in certain types of crime, such as domestic abuse and breaking and enterings, “but that just wasn’t the case,” Ting said.
Ting ran the call log numbers from March 9 — the day Amherst College announced it would shift to virtual learning — to May 27 and compared this year’s data from the same time period last year. Calls for service went down by 37%, he said, from 2,435 last year to 1,525 this year. Just in the past few weeks, Ting said, calls for service have been lower than normal as universities are shut down and fewer students are around.
He said the department is down “literally in every category” between those two time periods, citing numbers such as a 61% decrease in car crash reports (157 to 61) and a nearly 39% decrease in arrests (149 to 91). He said the department arrested fewer people because residents were adhering to stay-at-home guidance and that officers, as an alternative in some cases, have been issuing summonses to minimize physical contact.
“If there are crimes being committed where we can summons instead of arrest, we will do that,” Ting said.
The Amherst Police Department has been fortunate enough to not have any COVID-19 cases among officers, Ting said, but keeping employees healthy is still a major concern. He said he doesn’t know whether the department is planning to implement any of its precautionary measures permanently but that he expects social distancing guidelines to be around for a while.
“We’re gauging everything to see what works, what doesn’t work,” he said.
During the first few weeks of COVID-19 restrictions, Northampton Police Chief Jody Kasper said, the department saw a “dramatic” decrease in calls for service and crimes being reported.
“The streets were very quiet,” Kasper said. “Everybody was inside.”
Within the past two or three weeks, Kasper said the department has gone back to its regular activity levels on a day-to-day basis. Kasper also ran cumulative call data from March 1 to May 27 and compared this year’s activity with the same period last year.
Serious motor vehicle collisions in Northampton have gone down by 57%, she said, from 108 reports during that time period last year to 46 this year. Arrests also have gone down by about 62%, from 176 last year to 66 this year, according to Kasper. Drunken driving arrests have gone down by half from 20 to 10.
Breaking and enterings have gone down by 60% from 20 to 8; officers have gone to 30% fewer medical calls (924 to 645); and overdoses have decreased from 17 last year in that time period to 11 this year, according to Kasper.
Although some of the data show positive trends, Kasper said there also have been increases in certain types of crime in the city during the same time period. Vandalism in Northampton increased by 103%, from 29 to 59 reports; shoplifting has gone up by 16% from 55 to 64; and noise complaints have increased by 25% from 119 reports to 149, she said. The frequency of household domestic violence calls have stayed the same at 46, she said.
“There’s a lot of question in the domestic violence world and in the world of child abuse about whether or not these things may be occurring in the home but not reported,” Kasper noted, “because people don’t have that safe place to report from, or they may not feel like they have anywhere to go if things need to change in their living situation.”
Kasper said the department’s operations have changed during the pandemic as people reporting past incidents are more likely to have an officer call them to collect information rather than physically respond. She said officers no longer meet in large groups for shift changes, and many meetings are now virtual.
Although Kapser, like Ting, said it was too early to tell what protocols they may keep for the long haul, she said virtual meetings free up time otherwise spent driving and may be done “on a more regular basis.”
“It seems like almost every area that we deal with has been impacted one way or the other,” Kasper said. “It really will be fascinating when we get to the other end of this to look back and evaluate how we performed as a police department and as a city.”
Similar to Northampton, South Hadley Police Chief Jennifer Gundersen said her department also has reevaluated when it’s necessary to send an officer to answer a call about a past incident and when it can be handled remotely. Gundersen said there were some calls in which an officer would respond to take a report but that these reports are now more likely to be done by phone.
The department is looking to limit face-to-face contact in other ways as well. Residents seeking a license to carry a firearm used to come into the station, Gundersen noted. Now, the department mailing those forms to reduce physical contact. There’s also a new station officer whose job it is to triage calls, she said.
Remote investigation of past incidents is something Gundersen said she’d like to continue practicing when possible “because if there’s less time creating reports, then that gives us more time to investigate more serious incidents, it gives us more time to do outreach, it gives us more time to do traffic enforcements.”
South Hadley saw a 2% reduction in calls for service in March 2020 compared to the previous year, Gundersen said. April and May, however, went up by 21% since last year, she said. Motor vehicle crashes and arrests are down as there are fewer people on the roads, but calls for household/domestic violence in April and May have gone up by 42%, and crisis intervention calls increased by 183%, according to Gundersen. Early April saw a spike in industrial business break-ins and overnight vehicle larcenies, she said, but those have gone down.
Gundersen attributed part of the increase in crisis intervention calls to the fact that officers are more proactively checking in with residents who have a history of mental illness, thanks to a grant from the state Department of Mental Health: “We weren’t as organized with our crisis intervention model of policing last year,” she said.
She said she’s concerned about her officers’ health, but also about the well-being of the town’s children since school resource officers can’t check in with some kids who may be at risk at home. The department is focusing on educating citizens about the governor’s orders, Gundersen said, and has tried to give out face masks to people who don’t have them.
“We’re not looking to have a negative influence on our community members during this stressful time,” Gundersen said. “I think that really speaks volumes to the commitment that our police staff have to this community.”
Hadley Police Lt. Mitchell Kuc said that when classes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst stopped and businesses along Route 9 closed down, the department saw much less car traffic, leading to a significant drop in call volume. Now, Kuc said, the department has seen their call volume return to “pretty much back to normal.”
Across the Connecticut River, Easthampton Police Chief Robert Alberti said he observed similar trends, as call volume is “broadly and overall” down. But in the last two weeks, Alberti said, activity has begun shifting toward what he described as medium levels.
There have been spikes of domestic violence calls, noise complaints, neighbor disputes and crisis intervention, he said. Generally, Alberti said, people have been following social distancing guidelines.
The pandemic has exposed challenges in staffing, he said. Many police chiefs in the area have started scheduling officers for 12-hour shifts to have more coverage, but Alberti said he disagrees with that strategy as it puts more officers in contact with one another. Instead, Alberti said the department reduced staffing levels “down to the bare minimum.”
“It’s definitely changed the way we police, for sure,” he said.
He said Hadley and Easthampton are each other’s backup 911 call center if one town’s center gets overwhelmed. Both departments put money toward accessing each other’s radio frequencies so there’s easier collaboration between the two municipalities.
“If our dispatchers … get sick with COVID-19, we’ll be in a position where, if it wipes out our whole dispatch center, we’ll have a backup in place for 911 calls and vice versa,” he said.
Alberti said as calls begin to climb, he wants to go back to full staffing, which he thinks will “dovetail” with the governor’s phases of reopening. But he also wants to keep his staff healthy and plans on keeping precautionary measures, such as social distancing and disinfecting surfaces, in place.
“It’s definitely a balancing act,” Alberti said.