July 2025 Edition
By Rich Lockhart
Chief of Police
I get asked a lot about crime in our community. As we pass the first six months of 2025, I thought this would be a good time to share a snapshot of crime in Lawrence.
The National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBERS) is how we count crime reported to us. One of our Key Performance Indicators is measuring Group A crimes. Group A crimes are made up of Person Crimes, crimes like Murder, Rape, Robbery, Assault, and Battery. The Property Crimes include crimes like Burglary, Stealing, arson, and Auto Theft. The last category includes Crimes against society and includes drug/narcotic offenses, prostitution, and gambling offenses.
For the first six months of 2025, our person crimes were up by 32 incidents or 3% from 2024. Property Crimes were down by 163 incidents or 10% from 2024. Lastly, Society Crimes were up by 62 incidents or 22%.
In April of this year, we began using a proactive group of officers to focus specifically on the root causes of our increases in crime. Termed TRACE (Targeted Response and Community Enforcement), this group of officers are using a data driven approach to focus on short term investigations that target known violent criminals and drug traffickers to help reduce the impact of their actions on our community. The group has recovered 132 grams of Methamphetamine and 2 grams of fentanyl. For perspective, 2 grams of fentanyl is equivalent to 1000 lethal doses of the drug. The work this group of officers is doing is helping to make our community safer.
Our overall calls for service were down by .5% (234 calls) with Self-Initiated calls up 5% (978 calls) and Community Calls down 5% (1166 calls). These numbers aren’t surprising as calls for service typically go up in the summer months. The self-initiated numbers reflect the work mentioned with the TRACE team.
This by the numbers section provides you some detail about the work your officers do everyday as they work to keep our community Safe and Secure.
