Overall crime statistics in Howard County are up about 5 percent because of an increase in burglaries, rapes and robberies during the first three months of 2006.
Burglaries saw an increase of 49 percent; rapes, 75 percent; and robberies, 20 percent.
“What we?ve seen is an increase in construction-site burglaries,” said police spokeswoman Sherry Llewellyn, who added that a warm winter also helped increase burglaries. “We?ve got one person or one group of people committing large numbers of burglaries in short periods of time.”
While police are working to get burglaries under control, Llewellyn said officers have made headway against their robbery problem, creating a task force that has seen results.
In February, police temporarily reassigned officers from various agencies to participate in the robbery task force and increased both the undercover and uniformed presence throughout Columbia.
The result was a decline in the number of robbery cases in the county in the early part of 2006 and an increase in arrests for those serious crimes, police statistics show.
During the task force?s efforts, police made 62 violent-crime arrests as officers worked in the villages of Long Reach, Oakland Mills, Wilde Lake and Harper?s Choice. At the same time, robbery incidents in the county dropped to 14 in February and 16 in March, from 40 cases in January.
As officers saw less reports of robberies, statistics showed an increase in reports of rapes.
Police Chief Wayne Livesay, who retires today, said the increase of reports of rape is actually encouraging, because rape is an underreported crime.
“We know more rapes happen each year than those that are reported to police,” he said in a statement.
“Since this is traditionally an underreported crime, we are glad more women feel they can come forward after being so terribly victimized. Sadly, we can?t investigate a rape we don?t know about.”
All of the Howard County rapes reported in the first quarter of the year were committed by someone the victim knew, police said. More recently, police said, two women reported rapes by strangers ? crimes that occurred this month and are therefore not included in the report.
On May 4, a 19-year-old said she was raped in a wooded area off a bike path by Majors Lane in Owen Brown. This past weekend, a 21-year-old reported a similar attack in a wooded area off High Tor Hill in Long Reach.
