Columbus police to step up patrols near homeless shelter

Columbus police plan to step up patrols in the area around the Brighter Days homeless shelter on the east side of the city. That’s after complaints from neighbors and despite a lack of police statistics showing an increase in crime since the center opened.

At a neighborhood meeting this week, Police Chief Jon Rohde explained that his staff has looked at the statistics in the block surrounding the shelter on Mapleton Street and in almost every area they could measure, crime rates are the same this year as last year. But neighbors said they are finding and having to clean up used hypodermic needles and spoons used to cook drugs, almost daily. And they don’t call in a police report or ask for help picking up the paraphernalia because of the time involved.

Rohde urged residents to call police or firefighters to handle that sort of drug paraphernalia because of the possible dangers from drugs or disease. And he said if residents don’t report the incidents then they do not show up on activity tracking software, which guides police staffing and patrol area decisions.

The one outlier in the crime statistics was the number of reports of a suspicious person or vehicle in the neighborhood. That increased from about 40 last year to more than 80 so far this year.

One store owner said that a person, who appeared to be homeless, milled around outside her business late one night and then threw a rock through her $700 plate glass window. She caught the act on surveillance video, but it was too grainy to identify a suspect.

Residents also urged Rohde to look further into the police data to see how the crime rates compare to the years prior to the shelter opening.

Rohde said that his department would be adding more police car patrols and bike patrols as the weather permits. They also plan to spend more time talking to those wandering the neighborhood and to connect them with community resources, if needed.