The University police department’s crime prevention unit will begin its crime analysis this week on potential crime trends. 

In September 2011, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a federal grant of $616,548 to the University Police Department. With this grant, the University was able to hire three officers. The grant requires that at least 10 percent of the funding be spent on homicide, rape and repeat offenders, according to the Community Oriented Policing Services Hiring Program Award Selection Methodology. The University Police Department plans to focus on rape prevention.

When the department applied for the grant, the unit was trying to find community plans for preventing sexual assault. The unit just finished one of the efforts to raise awareness, in which officers finished their lessons on teaching men and women how to protect themselves.

Detective Robert Murphy of the University Police Department said these programs are made to prevent potential sexual assault crimes in the first place. “We need to make them aware of their surroundings, make them realize what’s going on and hopefully students in the program we can teach them to get that way,” Murphy said.

Detective Rebecca Lauher of the University Police and one of the instructors of the course, said it is important for students to be responsible individuals on campus.

“So the most important thing is to affect people’s behavior and making them aware of what’s going on around them,” Lauher said. “We can try changing the environment but again, it’s all about changing a person’s behavior and their patterns … That’s what crime prevention is about.” 

Sgt. Joan Fiesta of the University Police said the opportunity to do crime analysis because of the grant was a welcomed surprise.

“We found this one and it kind of matched what we thought we could do, but it was need based and program based,” Fiesta said. “We weren’t sure that we would get it … and we were quite surprised.”

Krissie Garcia, one of the new hires, is the crime and intelligence analyst from the unit and is expecting to read police reports from the University, Champaign and Urbana. The reports could help her connect the dots between crimes and possibly track crime trends on campus.

“In my role, I’ll be meeting with various representatives from other departments like Champaign-Urbana and Champaign County, and we’ll all be sharing information and hopefully we can all work together to maximize the program and minimize the crime,” she said.

Fiesta said the crime prevention unit’s purpose is to recognize recent crime patterns in order to reduce the number of crimes that occur.

“The crime analysis is important because it helps us understand the crime trends,” she said. “People tend to worry about the who is committing the crime and who isn’t necessary as important…but it’s the how the crime is committed.” 

Fiesta said the ability to hire more officers, especially a crime analyst, was one of the hopes of past police chief Barbara O’Connor when she was in the department.

“We had (the) need for more officers, this was part of Chief O’Connor’s plans to grow our department, to match the population and types of crime that were happening,” she said. “This money was really helpful in getting three more officers hired on our department.”

Carina can be reached at [email protected].