Sedona is known for its low crime rate but it does happen.
So, if you have ever wondered just how much and where it’s occurring, the Sedona Police Department has a tool to answer those questions.
Community Crime Mapping is a web-based program developed to help law enforcement agencies provide residents with information about recent crime activity in their neighborhood, the city’s website states. The program uses crime data extracted from the Sedona Police Department record system. The information is updated daily on the site.
“This is actually a new and improved program,” Lt. Lucas Wilcoxson said. “We did have a program four or five years ago that was not reliable and we struggled to get that one up and running. This is integrated into our records management system and is a lot more user-friendly.”
For privacy purposes, the program does not list specific addresses but rather the street and a range of plus or minus 100 block numbers. So, if an incident occurred at 300 Main St., the radius on the map would show it occurred between 200 and 400 Main St. One can view up to 180 days of crime data using different search parameters such as date range and crime type.
“We get a lot of requests as to what type of crime is occurring in Sedona,” he said. “We’ve never really had a place to direct people to. This way, they can go through and check it themselves. It’s a good tool to know what’s going on. And everything is more transparent this way.” This program is not simply designed to benefit the public as the police department has a more advanced version of what’s online and, so far, it’s been a big benefit, he said. It analyzes crimes based on dates and times. Through the data, officers can be assigned to specific areas if there seems to be a pattern of crimes or traffic incidents.
This mapping is just one part of the department’s upgraded records management system, which costs roughly $40,000 a year to maintain and is far less than the less system.
“Data-driven policing is the new way of using this type of information,” he said.
Most of the crimes reported in Sedona will be listed on the map except cases involving deaths, sexual offenses, juvenile offenses, business and residential alarms and traffic related offenses with the exception of DUI. At the end of each year, the police department will publish a list of the year’s nature of incidents, a compilation of types of calls for service and total calls reported for the year.
In all, SPD responded to 14,484 incidents in 2018. The most common included:
- Traffic stops: 2,597
- Traffic violations: 2,164
- Public assist: 1,678
- Alarms: 832
- Area check: 794
- Parking problem: 526
- Suspicious person or circumstances: 476
- 911 hang-up: 328
- Traffic accident with damage: 312
- Welfare check: 303
Some of the more serious crimes to be reported included theft, 150; DUI alcohol or drugs, 104; domestic violence, 70; burglary, 65; sex offense, 35; aggravated assault, seven; weapon offense, three; bomb threat or attack, two; kidnapping, one.
“These stats are on par with previous years but they have increased a little bit,” Wilcoxson said. “With our new records system we’re able to quickly pull this information. Our old one was not nearly as easy. When I do the Sedona Citizens Academy, I always ask how many incidents they think we handle each year. They say a few hundred. I show them this statistic [14,484] and their jaws drop. It’s a big eye-opener for many.”
The program can be found on the city’s website at sedonaaz.gov. Under departments, click police and then community crime mapping or click here.
