Crime for 2023 in Roanoke Rapids saw an overall decrease of 11.33 percent, city police Shane Guyant said.

These statistics include both crimes against property and crimes against persons.

“(The year 2022) was the first year that we were really coming of COVID,” he said in an interview last week. (The year 2023) is like the first year where we kind of put COVID in the rearview mirror. It does appear that people are behaving a little bit more. We have stepped up our efforts to be seen more. We want people to see those black and yellow cars and we want to prevent crime by being seen.”

He said he tells his officers while answering calls is important, “Self-initiated stuff is what reduces crime. If you are a bad guy or bad girl and you see these cars stopping folks and doing the legal stops and talking to people, you’re going to think twice about doing your business in the city.”

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When the county and municipalities were having store robberies before Christmas, “We did a lot of crime prevention efforts by going to the stores and talking to the storekeepers and store owners and telling them what to look for.”

That included advising them instead of having doors on both sides of the store open, have one of them locked.

They also advised the owners of stores that had cameras to make sure they were working and that their lighting was in a good place. “Just the old-fashioned crime prevention,” he said. “A lot of that we did and we did a lot to upgrade our patrol efforts to these areas to be seen more or get out of the cars. That’s the main thing — getting out of the cars and talking to people. I feel like we’ve done a really good job on that and that’s why I give all the credit to the officers because they’ve done a majority of these things.”

In the time leading up to Christmas, the chief said, “We did some things that I can’t really talk about that were kind of out of the box thinking. We did some things that we thought worked really well (including) plainclothes officers being around the area and cameras — little bitty nitpicky things like that that most people wouldn’t see and wouldn’t notice.”

But the biggest thing, he said, “Is just telling our officers to get out of the car, to go talk to someone. You’d be surprised just by going to somebody and speaking to them how sometimes that will scare them off a little. If they’re up to nefarious activities and they’re trying to do bad, if we can be seen and they see us they will move on. We were very, very fortunate, I would say fortunate-lucky more than anything that we did.”

There will be even more of the strategies used as winter turns to spring and summer, Guyant said. “The more manpower we can get, the more vacancies we can fill, the better our tactics are going to be.”

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In 2022 the police department took 675 reports which included 2,930 crimes. The clearance rate that year was 73.2 percent.

In 2023, the police department took 747 reports that included 2,604 crimes. The clearance rate for last year was 81.7 percent — an 8.5 percent increase in clearances — done with 17 percent less staff than there was in the previous year.

Guyant said, however, “Even law enforcement efforts can’t stop murders. We only had one extra than the year before.”

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One of the city’s biggest crimes is larceny, Guyant said, a crime that in 2023 took a 10.39 percent nosedive. “That and breaking and entering (which increased by .66 percent) are what draws everybody’s attention. It’s the people that work hard for a living, they own stuff and then somebody steals it is the most angst they can cause a citizen. We’ve pushed our efforts into being seen a little bit more. At nighttime when we see somebody walking in a neighborhood we’ll stop and we’ll identify them and talk to them and try to find out who they are and why they’re there.”

Sometimes they say nothing. Sometimes they talk. “Either or, we’re making that connection with them,” Guyant said. “Sometimes just getting that information will be that little lead that detectives needed to help solve a B&E they might have had.”

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Currently the police department is six officers short. “However, we are in the process of hiring someone else and we have two in school so really we’re going to be about three short. We have to get everybody’s certification squared away. We have two that are going to BLET (basic law enforcement training) so they won’t be available until after the summer. Then we have to get their training in, which is 12 weeks worth of training.”

Discussing the crime rate as it relates to the staff shortages, Guyant said, “Since I’ve been here this staff has been nothing but dedicated and they are really determined to want to do the job correctly. They’re excited about it.”

He said the police department has had people come work here because they were interested in the excitement they were hearing about. “We just feel like we’re doing a good job leading them. We feel like we’re doing a good job giving them the tools they need to work with — supporting them.” 

Administrators are working as well, Guyant said. “Just because the admin staff is working in the office — I worked New Year’s Eve night — when we’re working those hours they’re seeing us. That’s inspiring them to want to work a little bit harder.”

Some of this goes back to previous administrations, the chief said. “It just has to be followed through with the equipment that they’ve gotten. We’ve been able to maintain that and give them a little bit more. They feel appreciated because more and more people on social media and in the public are coming to them and telling them ‘thank you for your service,’ ‘good job,’ ‘appreciate what you do.’ That helps out.”

It also helps that the city made a commitment to give them a boost in pay. “We did some creative things when we came in July to try to maneuver some old positions around and to do away with some old positions. We had to give a little to get a little.”

Pay-wise, Guyant said, Roanoke Rapids officers are among the highest paid in the northeastern area. “Of course we can’t compete with Wake County and different counties like that but we’re competing with local counties — even Nash County.”

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He said the mission is to make the department a place people want to feel comfortable working where they know they can grow and get better. “We don’t want to have a city that is lawless. We don’t want to have a city that is running wild.

“Do we need help from the DA’s office? Absolutely. We need them to step up. We don’t want problems in a case to be our fault. We don’t want problems when we go to court or trial. We don’t want to let the victims down because we failed on our end.”

Guyant said he has not received any data from the DA’s office on the department’s conviction rate. “We’re going to court a lot. Sometimes we get convictions and sometimes they get dismissed.”

He said the conviction rate is something the department wants to know. “We’ve put processes in place and hopefully this time next year we’ll know the answer to that.”

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Then there’s training. “We’re training folks. We’ve done 4,100 hours worth of training for our folks (in 2023) — 116 different classes that these officers got to attend ...”

And, he said, the police department did 220 community events last year which equated to 1,100 hours worth of officers working. “We’ve got to have trust. If they don’t trust us we’re useless. If the people in this city don’t trust this police department then you might as well put us in a box and throw us in the trash because we’ve got to have their trust.”

Guyant said Sir Robert Peel, one of the people who started law enforcement in the early days of England, “Used to make the comment about how the public is the police and the police is the public. It is so accurate even to today’s time. We can’t function without the public because they call when they see something. We have Crimestoppers as a tool where they can report anonymously and get paid. The community is so important that not only do we need their trust but we look at the young kids and we show them that we’re not the bad guy.”

The aim for this year is to see the numbers go lower. “We’re going to try to be as aggressive as we can to take the bad people off the street because there’s way more good than there is bad and the people that are out here working their butts off every day to pay the taxes, to have the nice things in life to enjoy, just to survive, we have to do our job in making sure that they’re not victims, they’re not taken advantage of by those who don’t want to put the work in.”