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With every new crime story that is posted on social media, LaGrange residents lament a perceived increase in crime, often comparing the city to larger cities where crime is rampant like Atlanta. While LaGrange is obviously not perfect and has its issue with gangs and more recently, school shooting threats, crime — especially violent crime incidents — is actually down in the city.

This time last year, LaGrange had 465 violent crimes and serious felonies all combined. This year we have 436, a reduction of about 6 percent.

Chief Garrett Fiveash said that the number of aggravated assaults in the city is technically up, at least according to FBI reporting standards, but the number of overall incidents is down.

The numbers look skewed on the high side because when there is an aggravated assault, where there are multiple victims, that counts as multiple aggravated assaults even though it is only one shooting, where in many cases no one was actually hurt.

Fiveash explained that if someone shoots into an occupied home and there’s one person inside, that constitutes one aggravated assault charge. 

“If there’s six people in there, that six counts. So that’s six aggravated assaults, even though that stems from a singular incident. It doesn’t lessen the severity of it, or lessen the danger to the people involved. But from a purely statistical point of view, it makes it look worse than it is,” Fiveash said.

But overall, violent and other serious crimes are still down, he said.

The biggest change is in the homicide rate. LaGrange had eight homicides by this time last year. This year we’ve only had one.

Fiveash attributed the decline to increased visibility, officers getting out and being more proactive, as well as their crime suppression patrols. He said increased help and trust from the community are also helping.

“We’re starting to get more intelligence coming in from the community, and I think we’re broadening our trust base a little bit. We got one just yesterday, a tip from a community member who, typically would not be very supportive of the police department,  but they thought enough of us and the community to bridge that gap and extend that hand and say, Hey, this is something I heard about. Thought you’d probably need to know about it,” Fiveash said.

“That’s not just things that are happening with me, that’s happening with our officers, that’s happening with our SROs, and people kind of building that trust and getting to the point where people don’t mind saying things because we all have a vested interest in solving the [crime] problem because it helps all of us.”

Fiveash said there is one crime statistic that is up. Shoplifting. 

“We’ve been overrun with shoplifting this year. We have 160 more this year to date than last year,” Fiveash said.

The shoplifting increase is understandable, especially with rampant inflation.

“That does drive people,” Cap. Robert Kirby said. “If you can’t buy bread, you’ll go steal it.”

Fiveash said having more officers to patrol and reduce response times has certainly helped with crime as well.

“We were short 23 officers last year,” Fiveash said. “But if I had to attribute [the reduction] to one thing, I think it would just be mere visibility and officer presence in the community more than anything.”