The City of Fort Wayne and Fort Wayne’s Police Department held a joint news conference Monday to discuss decreasing crime numbers from 2016 to 2017, as well as plans for the new year.
Fort Wayne’s 2017 crime numbers were down 5 percent from the previous year, with a 27 percent drop in burglaries and 14 percent drop in homicides.
Police chief Steve Reed says 2017 was an encouraging year, but the department still has a lot of work to do in the New Year.
“The Fort Wayne Police Department will continue to do everything possible to address crime in our city, and we recognize that we continue to have struggles with crime in our city,” said Reed.
One of those struggles is the ongoing opioid epidemic. FWPD doubled its amount of drug raids from 2016 and arrested 87 percent more individuals for drugs than last year.
Rapes were also up 43 percent, and Reed says he believes this is due to more people reporting, something Mayor Tom Henry echoed in a December interview with WBOI.
In 2018, Fort Wayne is expected to hire 28 new police officers, continue its UNITED program through a second full year and continue its fight against the opioid epidemic.
