Hope that helps. Having lived in other cities and states far bigger than Idaho, it’s still a safer place here than most.

My #’s are very true. A typical weekday by the way can vary anywhere from six officers to thirteen depending on scheduling. From 5pm to 9pm there are typically about eight. From 9pm to 2am there is an overlap of shifts so you might have twelve or thirteen again but one shift goes home at 2am. I have no way to demonstrate the truthfulness of that at this time so you’ll have to take my word for it. But I can demonstrate in a roundabout way how its true.

There are approximately 90 officers on the IFPD. Of those about 40 are assigned to patrol. The rest are adminstration, school officers, detectives, narcs, DARE, evidence, etc. So now you must spread those 45 officers across 24 hrs 7 days a week and they can only work 40 hrs per week. Now also consider that police officers do get vacation time, they do call in sick sometimes, and because of the nature of their sometimes violent job they are always some on injury duty / light duty (currently my spouse who is feeding me this info, guess what he is, tells me there is an officer out with a broken bone in his foot, an officer out with a bum knee, an officer out who just had ACL surgery, and an officer out who screwed up his ankle). Furthermore of those 45 you often have some who are rookies in training meaning you have two officers, the rookie and his trainer, operating as one. So really at any given time you only have 35- officers to actually work with in filling your schedule. Which leads to things where you only have small numbers actually working. Now factor in the fact that like all workers they get lunch breaks. Also consider the excessive amounts of time they must spend in the office doing reports. Or booking someone into jail. Basically there will be times, especially during the weekends or late nights, when there are only 1 or 2 officers, if that many, actually on the street. Oh sure in an emergency those writing reports or those on breaks will clear to respond but thats different than if they were actually on patrol.

The same could be said about the news. It may put out “boring” stories, but I think that is in part of keeping our community sounding, “easy on the ears”. How many of us were aware of the shots that were fired at Cleveland and Fanning last week? That didn’t make the news at all. You would think there would have been some story about a shooting in a residential neighborhood.

I’m not sure I get the statement though about readers burglary comment being reduced to petit theft. I say that because the police still had to use an officer to respond to the call. Then they had to investigate. Then they had to go through the arresting process. All which is time consuming regardless to what the charge was reduced to. If you say well that didn’t count as a burglary, well then it counted as a theft call. Either way it counted toward a Call For Service. So really you’re not lowering the number.

I know we will never solve crime, but at least we should have enough police to slow it down.

That type of “burglary” is obviously a lot different than a home burglary or store robbery, which themselves are much scarier. Goes to show we really need to know the facts behind the stats before making judgement about how safe it is here, or not.

All in all, we always say our area is pretty safe to live when it comes to “anonymous” crimes in comparison to other cities, especially violent crime here in SE Idaho where you can almost always see a link b/w the offender and victim. Elsewhere the nightly news is full of crime after crime. I guess we should be thankful our news tends to be “boring”.

I would say there would be a lot of complaining to the Mayor, Chief, or Sheriff, if it took the police 20 to 30 minutes just to show up.

I sure hope comment #72 is false. That is very disturbing.

Guest House it doesn’t matter if they are false or made by nut jobs, because the police still has to respond to them. That was the point I was trying to make.

All 5441 of the Calls For Service is what a single, and sometimes double, police officer(s) had to respond to.

Plus you would have to factor in the amount of time they would have to take to find out if the call was bogus or not.

Also, if you go by the media to get an idea of what crime is like your in a very very fantasy world. I can say with absolute certainty that at least 5 rapes or molestations are reported to the police every single week. Yet you never hear about them because the police don’t advertise that kind of stuff since they are ongoing investigations. The IFPD like many agencies also hides reports from many ongoing investigations so that the investigation is not compromised by the media.

If you take a per capita look at crime in Idaho Falls you’ll be shocked and saddened to learn that per capita many of our crime rates are equivalent to that of Los Angeles or New York, especially certain types of violent and property crimes. The only places we tend to be better in are things related to gangs since despite the media’s attempts to portray a gang problem here we do not have one at all relative to those places.

But, burglary isn’t the only thing they have to worry about…it’s a small part of everything the officer ends up taking a call for.

Friends and neighbors, I submit that I am GLAD we have this many police officers that can respond to those calls, because I want to be able to make a call and have a response right away.

THEN someone can tell me later that in their opinion, my call wasn’t ‘valid’…but until then, I want the security of having my call to the police be responded to in a timely manner.

Of course, I’m a foolish old woman. Maybe I’m totally missing the point of these comments?

I’ll meet at the top Guest House

I located the Calls For Service for the Sheriff’s Office. For January 2008:

Sheriff’s Total: 3959 (14 of the 3959 were burglaries)

By statistics, thus far, the Police & Sheriff are far busier than Fire/EMS.

For some reason they don’t have the Calls For Service for the Sheriff’s Office.  That was only the Idaho Falls Police Dept. 
Another note you learn is the Calls For Service for the Fire/EMS is for all of Bonneville County, and they even cover portions of other counties.  I didn’t know they covered part of other counties as well. 

These facts are from: http://www.co.bonneville.id.us/911/iffd.html. This should give us a little clearer picture on what things are like in our quiet little town. Brace yourself (sarcasm):

As of the reported Calls For Service for January 2008:
Fire Dept/EMS Total: 1159
Police Dept Total: 5441 (63 of the 5441 were burglaries)

These stats are only for the month of January 2008. I think it would be safe to say “a few” happens more than every three to four weeks.

Plus were about to hit warmer weather too which you guessed it, crime rate goes up.

Compare the call loads of firefighters to police. It’s public record. That will tell you why we need the number of police we have if not more.

Are people really that gullable to think burglary isn’t rampant in our town?