Violent crime up in Warner Robins; leaders look for ways to curb it

With violent crime up in Warner Robins, it wasn’t surprising that the issue was raised at a recent town hall meeting.

Most people voiced support of the police department. A former mayoral candidate, Eva Folse, said the city needs to declare war on crime, or “it’ll get worse.”

Les Brown Jr., who raised the issue, said afterward that the community needs to support law enforcement and that people need to get involved when they see or hear about a crime.

“What I’m saying to the citizens that do care about each other is to speak up because that’s the way we’re going to get the crime to go down,” said Brown, a lifelong resident.

Violent crimes of murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery totaled 494 in 2016 compared to 397 in 2015, an increase of 97, according to Warner Robins crime statistics.

Broken down, the city had three homicides in 2015 and six in 2016. So far this year, the city has recorded three homicides.

Aggravated assaults rose by 63 from 251 in 2015 to 314 in 2016. Robberies increased by 26 from 117 in 2015 to 143 in 2016, and rapes were up by five from 26 in 2015 to 31 in 2016, according to updated crime stats from Warner Robins police.

“We were up a little bit, and my deal is this, I’m never satisfied with that,” Mayor Randy Toms said after the town hall meeting Thursday night at Agape Outreach Ministries at 295 North Davis Drive. “I mean you’re always going to have a certain element of crime, but you can never be content with crime with at all — much less it increasing. So that concerns me.”

Toms said he’s been meeting with Police Chief Brett Evans about trying to figure out ways to curb crime from looking at an innovated policing-community partnership in High Point, North Carolina, to looking at what can be done at the state level to address issues like gaming machines at convenience stores.

“So, we’re looking at innovative ways, the things that we hadn’t necessarily ever looked at, to try and find an answer,” Toms said.

Evans, who was not at the town hall meeting, was not available for comment Friday and did not respond by Tuesday to a request for an interview.

One initiative already in place that the mayor said does work is what he calls “sitting on a house,” where police monitor a home where residents are suspected of drug dealing and make arrests.

“Unfortunately, people are so content with doing what they’re doing, that they move somewhere else, and you’ve got to find them and you got to keep after them all the time,” Toms said.

He said police need the community’s help in curbing crime.

“The big thing that we need help with … is the Neighborhood Watch,” Toms said. “The people that are in the communities, when they see something, they see a house that looks like a drug house, let us know.”

When statistics for all four law enforcement agencies in Houston County were combined, violent crime increased by 107 from 525 in 2015 to 632 in 2016.

The bulk of the violent crime was concentrated in the city limits of Warner Robins, where about half of the county’s population resides.

But Perry police recorded its first homicide in eight years in 2016. The Houston County Sheriff’s Office didn’t work any homicides in 2016, but two were investigated in the unincorporated area of the county in 2015. Centerville had none.

Aggravated assaults were up across the board, except in Centerville, which had four less in 2016 than in 2015.

The statistics for rape and robberies were a mixed bag among the agencies.

This story was originally published March 21, 2017 at 6:31 PM with the headline "Violent crime up in Warner Robins; leaders look for ways to curb it."