In Cd'A, crime doesn't pay

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

When police arrested David Bogdanovich after midnight a few days before Christmas in a west Coeur d’Alene neighborhood for allegedly breaking into parked cars, it wasn’t a routine patrol that snagged the 24-year-old Spokane man and an accomplice.

Coeur d’Alene police were notified by residents of suspicious people walking around the North Mountain Vista Drive neighborhood.

Capt. Lee Brainard said he has worked at other places and for other departments where receiving a similar call would be considered an anomaly.

“Our relationship with the public is so solid we have people call us,” Brainard said. “That’s a critical part of our success.”

The Coeur d’Alene department’s success is in the numbers.

According to its year-end crime statistics, the department has seen significant reductions in crime across the board.

It isn’t just a one-year phenomenon.

Crimes against people, the big ones that the department refers to as Type 1 crimes which include aggravated assault, auto burglaries, rape and theft, have dropped significantly since 2014 — almost 60 percent over the last five years, according to the department’s figures. The department compiles the numbers throughout the year as part of police incident reports.

Last year officers logged 80 aggravated assaults, which became cases that were assigned a number by the department. The number was down 25 cases from a year earlier.

The number of auto burglaries, such as the case that Bogdanovich was allegedly nabbed for around 3 a.m. Dec. 18, dropped from 180 in 2018 to 145 last year, a 19 percent reduction. Rape cases fell 36 percent from 53 cases a year earlier to 34 last year. The number of vehicle thefts fell from 76 in 2018 to 48 last year, a 37 percent drop. Compared to a year earlier, the number of larcenies — general theft — dropped from 588 to 441 cases.

The type of policing that Brainard and Capt. Dave Hagar attribute to the drop in crime is called proactive, a word other departments toss around to distance themselves from that other word. No one wants to be reactive.

Chasing incidents as they happen is one way to respond to crime.

For Coeur d’Alene, however, proactive means focusing on hot spots, watching daily or weekly crime numbers and trends, building relationships with neighbors, knowing where incidents have occurred — or are likely to occur — and focusing forces there.

It means having officers stop and talk to residents, show their presence and get to know the neighborhoods in addition to patrolling those areas.

The proactive approach curtails crime.

It stops crime before it happens.

“We focus efforts where the issues are,” Hagar said. “It’s intelligence-led policing.”

And officers coordinate with other agencies in the area.

“It doesn’t matter who puts the cuffs on (criminals),” Hagar said.

Using in-house statistics to focus efforts where crime is likely to occur also affects what the department refers to as Type 2 crimes, such as child abuse, assault, sex offenses and trespassing.

Those crimes fell by 16 percent since last year, while Type 1 crimes fell 28 percent from 2018 to 2019.

The Coeur d’Alene department was shadowed last year by Nampa police who wanted to learn how to use the CompState — in house crime tracking software — to reduce crime in their own town.

By following Coeur d’Alene’s lead, the Nampa department in its first quarter saw a dramatic decrease in crime.

Prior to launching CompStat, Nampa officers spent 84 percent of their time chasing calls. That number has since dropped to 56 percent, Nampa Police analyst Kenneth Keene told the local newspaper.

By following trends and putting officers where crimes were likely to happen, the department saw a decrease in offenses of between 25 and 30 percent, according to the department.

Proactive policing and getting the community to work with police makes simple sense, Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said.

“We would rather have people call us so we can prevent a crime,” White said.

That’s better than getting a call after a crime occurred.

“It all goes back to cooperative efforts,” he said.

And the proof is in the numbers.

A graph of Type 1 crimes in the city looks like a ski slope. The peak number of Type 1 crimes in 2014 was 2,091, while last year the number had fallen to 843.

Despite the region’s population growing at a rapid pace, crime numbers keep falling and the Coeur d’Alene Police Department stays on task, meeting with community members, building ties, collaborating with neighboring agencies and departments, sharing information.

“We’re very good at being proactive,” Brainard said.