Naperville sees crime drop across the board in 2024
However, Naperville Police Chief Jason Arres wants to emphasize the crime has stayed relatively consistent over the past three years, he said.
'Obviously, I'm going … say, 'Hey, I love the fact that crime is down.' That's the trend we want to see,' he said. 'But I'm also conscientious that it's not (by) astronomical numbers.'
The police department breaks down annually reported crime data into three categories: property crimes, personal crimes and crimes against society.
Property crime was down slightly last year, dropping to 2,487 incidents from 2,599 in 2023 — a difference of about 112 cases. That's after rising 192 incidents between 2022 and 2023.
Personal crime, which police measure by the number of victims not incidents, there were 167 fewer people victimized in 2024 than in 2023, with reported crimes totaling 1,000 last year. From 2022 to 2023, personal crime changed by less than a percent.
There were 369 reported crimes against society last year, down 42 incidents from 2023. That's after a year-to-year decline of 185 incidents from 2022 to 2023.
'I like it when I see massive, massive drops,' Arres said. 'And I don't like it if it was a massive, massive raise. We're very consistent. … These numbers are pretty consistent across the board, and there's not a ton of anomalies.'
Police also track traffic crash data. Last year, there were 2,791 crashes that did not result in injury, 457 that had injuries and eight crash-related fatalities, data shows. Crashes were up by 445 incidents over 2023. Traffic crashes in 2024 were also the highest they have been since 2019.
To prevent crashes, Arres stressed that 'safety is a partnership.'
'The responsibility really falls on the person that's in the driver's seat of a car. … So, yes, police have a super important role in traffic safety, but that's enforcing the law,' he said. 'What we really need as a community and as a society as a whole is for people to follow the traffic laws.'
While contextualizing crime statistics, Arres said the department switched to the Federal National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) in 2022. The system they used previously kept track of only the most serious crimes whereas NIBRS tallies every single crime in its official data, he said.
'We're kind of starting on a clean sheet of music, so to speak. … We only have three years of a baseline,' Arres said.
Most recent data, which police published in late February, shows that property offenses accounted for about 64% of Naperville's total reported crime in 2024. These are mostly cases of fraud, theft and vandalism, police say.
Theft made up nearly half of all property crimes reported. Most notably, shoplifting increased to 430 incidents last year, up 47 from 383 reports in 2023.
Motor vehicle theft also rose slightly, from 81 incidents in 2023 to 94 in 2024, data shows. These incidents have been on the rise since 2022, largely due to a social media trend that gave people step-by-step instructions on how to steal Kias and Hyundais through videos posted to platforms such as TikTok, Arres said.
That said, he noted that of the 94 reports of motor vehicle theft last year, a third were attempts and only about half involved a forced entry.
'We could have lowered that number … had we just locked our cars,' he said.
Another property crime that hit residents particularly hard last year was fraud. Naperville residents reported losing nearly $5.5 million to scammers in 2024, a sum authorities have said is a dramatic increase from previous years.
For personal crimes, the largest year-to-year difference was in reports of intimidation, which dropped from 355 in 2023 to 155 in 2024. Intimidation is when someone places another person in 'reasonable fear of bodily harm through the use of threatening words and/or other conduct, but without displaying a weapon or subjecting the victim to actual physical attack,' NIBRS offense definitions state.
Asked about the decline in cases of intimidation, Arres said, 'We're still doing a deeper dive on the data to figure out possibly what the reason behind that is.'
As for crimes against society, drug/narcotic violations totaled 231 last year, down 20 from 251 violations in 2023. Weapon law violations were also down, dropping from 116 in 2023 to 91 in 2024.
Speaking to the latter, Arres said that while weapon violations 'still grab headlines,' people are 'catching wind of how proactive we are, so it's eliminating that crime of opportunity. … I think it speaks to the job that our men and women do on a daily basis by proactively getting out there and enforcing the laws.'
tkenny@chicagotribune.com
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