Property crime, however, has continued to trend upward in recent years, with about 12% more incidents reported in 2022 than in 2021, Chief Paul Neudigate told council members. Those incidents include motor vehicle thefts, items stolen from inside cars, commercial and residential burglaries, as well as thefts from retail stores.
Property offenses make up for the great majority of the city’s crime, Neudigate said, with 94.3% of the nearly 9,000 crimes reported in 2022 being classified as property-related.
With motor vehicle thefts, police have determined that in about 40% of cases the vehicle’s owner left the doors unlocked and the key fob inside, the chief said.
“We could reduce those (theft) numbers by 40% overnight if (car owners) were just more cognizant about not leaving key fobs in the vehicles,” he said.
Neudigate said he was proud of the work his officers and staff have done to keep violent crime down and clear cases with arrests. Compared to other cities in the region — and those of similar size across the country — Virginia Beach’s violent crime rate is at the low end, he said.
“While many of the other cities are going in the exact wrong direction in regards to violent crime we are actually showing decreases,” the chief said. “We had our best year in five years last year.”
One area the department has been focused on is getting guns off the streets, Neudigate said. A little more than 1,650 guns were recovered last year, up 32% from the number seized the previous year, and 64% from 2017.
The number of shooting victims in the city also decreased last year, down nearly 15% over the previous year. There were 64 shooting victims in the city in 2022, compared to 75 in 2021, and 97 in 2020. Of the 64 victims shot in 2022, 19 died from their injuries.
The number of people killed last year, however, was up significantly from the past two years. There were 23 homicides in 2023, compared to 15 last year, and 17 in 2020. Four of last year’s homicide victims were juveniles.
The city’s homicide clearance rate remained high last year, with police arresting suspects in 18 of the 23 homicide cases. That makes for a 78% clearance rate, which was well above that of other cities in the region, as well as the national clearance rate of 54%.
Of the five cases that have not yet been cleared by arrest, Neudigate told council members his detectives have “substantial leads” in some that could lead to arrests soon.
One area of concern for the chief is the number of murders last year that involved marijuana deals gone bad. Six of the 23 homicides last year were marijuana-related.
“It should be concerning to all of us that we have young men dying in the city of Virginia Beach over $200 of marijuana,” Neudigate said.
The chief said much of the department’s success in recent years has been due to financial support it’s received from council for things such as hiring bonuses for new officers, and purchasing new equipment and technology. He also thanked community members who provided information that helped lead to arrests.
“We have much greater citizen cooperation,” than police in other cities, Neudigate said.
The staffing shortages that have plagued the department in recent years also have been improving, he said. The department is currently down about 35 officers, after having been down 87 in 2021.
Some of the technological improvements the department has made include adding a gunshot detection system that alerts dispatchers when shots are fired and adding more surveillance cameras to hot spots. The purchase of things like a new records management system, license plate readers, intelligence analysis software and more in-car cameras for patrol cars also has been key, Neudigate said.
The records management system, which was installed in December, will allow officers to know about trending hot spots within a matter of hours, rather than days, he said.
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