Crime Stoppers hosts program
The Fayette County Crime Stoppers hosted a program Wednesday to help area residents understand home invasion and learn how to keep from being a victim. Unfortunately, the community wasn’t interested.
No one attended the meeting, which featured Fayette County District Attorney Nancy Vernon, Fayette County Sheriff Gary Brownfield, state police trooper Brian Burden, members of Fayette County 911 and members of the Crime Stoppers program, so the volunteers and officials held a roundtable discussion to briefly address the aspects of the Crime Stoppers program.
“There is a lot of apathy,” said Darryl Smith, chairman of the Fayette County Crime Stoppers. “I’m a little disappointed because the citizens didn’t take part in this. We could do a lot of good with meetings like this.”
“I don’t know why no one came. Maybe it is because the meeting wasn’t affiliated with a normal gathering like municipal meetings,” Vernon added.
Smith said the officials present at the meeting volunteered their time to speak at the event and that without citizen participation, Crime Stoppers and crime watches cannot function.
“If you stick your head in the sand, one day someone will show up and you will be the victim. People have got to step up to the plate, take the bull by the horns and get involved,” Smith said.
The group said some area citizens are involved in neighborhood crime watches and similar programs that help deter crime, but he noted that more needs to be done to curtail the growing boldness of criminals, especially home invaders.
According to the officials, home invasion is a media-made term that defines crimes that take place in the home when the residents are there. They said such crimes are on the rise and that the elderly are the most common victims.
Vernon said that almost all burglaries and robberies at residences used to take place when no one was home and that “casing” a home to study the inhabitants’ travel patterns was customary for criminals. Now, she said, criminals take a different approach.
“Now it seems like they relish that someone is home,” Vernon said, adding that often the crimes are drug-related and show a lack of respect for people being in the home.
She noted that through the Fayette County Drug Task Force, more than 400 offenders have been arrested in the past year-and-a-half. The task force is a branch of Crime Stoppers, and both operate on an anonymous tip basis.
Brownfield said that drugs are now the primary motivation for crime in the county: “People will do anything to get drugs. They don’t care. They prey on anyone.”
More than 20,000 Fayette County residents have permits for handguns, Brownfield said, and that number is high because people are afraid of crime and home invasion. He said that buying a gun without the knowledge to operate it just complicates matters and often provides an additional weapon for an intruder. He said gun owners should educate themselves and learn how to use their weapon for protection.
Burden said just simple things like self-education can make the difference between a prosperous, safe community and a crime-laden one. “The reason we were having this meeting tonight was to educate,” he said.
Burden said residents should learn to talk through a locked door rather than open it to strangers. The elderly are a target because, as a whole, they are more trusting and more likely to stash money at home rather than in a bank, he added.
Doug Myers, a supervisor at Fayette County 911, said that calling in an emergency from a cellular phone is another common mistake people make. He advised area residents to use a landline if they have access to one, because a dispatch can be sent immediately to the home. He said 911 operators have no way to trace a cell phone call, but home phones give the dispatcher immediate, pertinent information.
All the officials agreed that the programs in place are working to deter crime in the county and that in some cases the rewards offered for tips have criminals turning in other criminals. The officials plan to hold more meetings.
to help educate the community about crime prevention and home invasion in the future, possibly on the municipal level rather than countywide.