Sheriff: ‘We live in a safe county here’
A look at crime statistics for Gulf County shows a rise in
the crime index, and a drop in the crime rate, but Sheriff Mike Harrison said you
have to look beyond these fluctuations.
“Gulf County is a safe place to live,” he said. “We don’t have
the murders, the armed robberies, the violent crimes you see in some of the other
larger counties. It’s still a safe place.
“All of it boils down to we live in safe county here,”
Harrison said. “I’m proud to be sheriff. I’m always concerned when I see an uptick,
and we’re working every day to keep it in check.”
What the annual Uniform Crime Report recently
released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement showed was that the total
crime index – which tracks murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary,
larceny and motor vehicle theft – had throughout the county gone from 232 to
248, an increase of 6.9 percent. FDLE calculates the crime index based on
population and the total number of index crimes reported by law enforcement.
In the case of Port St. Joe, which had a much smaller number
of crimes than the county as a whole, the index dropped by more than 38
percent, while countywide it had gone up by a little more than 18 percent.
The biggest factor was a rise in aggravated assaults, which
covers a multitude of offenses. The total number in the county went from 33 in 2019
to 63 in 2020.
“With COVID and shut-ins and the stress associated with that,
it does create a pressure cooker,” Harrison said. “I attribute of that to the
COVID situation. We stayed busy during the months we were shut in.
“Overall, with the changes since Hurricane Michael, I believe
there is a slight uptick in crime,” he said. “We’re still building and there’s a
lot of open work sites and a lot of transient workers that are not part of our
community.
“As far as the drug situation, I can’t say it’s more or less
than before.” Harrison said. “As with all rural America there is a drug problem
here and we work every day to combat that.”
The crime rate, which is a measurement of crime per 100,000
population declined by about 5 percent countywide, with Port St. Joe seeing a
whopping roughly 43 percent drop. But because overall numbers can be small, a
small difference one year to the next can mean a big percentage shift.
“We’re still adjusting to a new (reporting) system,” said
the sheriff.
The clearance rate for crimes, for both departments, is
roughly 50 percent.
An effort by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to
transition away from the UCR’s Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the new
National Incident Based Reporting System (NIMRS) is expected to modernize the
crime reporting system, which was first established in 1929.
The FBI said the UCR program retired the SRS and
transitioned to a NIBRS-only data collection in January, a system officials
state will provide a more comprehensive view of crime.
Reporting System, which will be used to compile crime information from
Florida’s law enforcement agencies in line with NIBRS.
“NIBRS has more thorough data and will help law enforcement
target their resources to fight crime effectively,” said the FBI in a press
release. “For example, SRS only counts the most serious crime at one particular
incident. So, if there is a robbery and a murder at the same time and place,
SRS would only count the murder. NIBRS will count both the robbery and the
murder and provide much more context, such as the day and time of the crime and
the relationship of the victim to the offender.”
Unlike data reported through the SRS – an aggregate monthly
tally of crimes – NIBRS goes into deeper detail because of its ability to
provide circumstances and context for crimes like location, time of day, and
whether the incident was cleared.
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.