Reported incidents of crime continue to fall in Rahway and surrounding areas, down almost 19 percent in the city last year and 10 percent countywide.

The drop follows a similar decrease of 13 percent in 2017. The last time reported incidents of crime increased was 2015 when they increased about 7 percent.

The 2018 data are somewhat incomplete as numbers on the Department of Law & Public Safety’s website lack December 2018 statistics for a full year-over-year comparison. Police Chief John Rodger provided the city’s December numbers, which he said were good so the year-to-date data posted should be pretty close.

Here’s an Excel file I’ve compiled from Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data spanning the past 20 years (1999-2018), with overall numbers and 5-, 10-, 15- and 20-year averages for Rahway. The 2018 crime rate per 1,000 residents is 8.1. That’s down from 10.0 last year; half of the 16.1 it was in 2013; almost a third of the 23.9 in 2007; and about a quarter of the 34.7 that it was in 2001.

(To calculate an accurate crime rate per 1,000 residents, I used a population estimate of 30,131 from the U.S. Census for 2018 of 30,131, up from 29,451 in 2017.)

Motor vehicle theft was the only category that rose last year, up from 35 to 38. Rodger said car thefts were up regionally but so far this year are trending down again. Only six of the 21 towns in Union County reported an increase in crime (and that includes Winfield going from 7 to 10 incidents overall).

Here’s a look at how Rahway’s decline from 425 incidents to 347 compared with some neighboring towns:

• Carteret, 534 incidents to 395, -26 percent
• Clark, 212 to 230, +8.5 percent
• Edison, 1,470 to 1,397, -5 percent
• Linden, 1,405 to 1,518, +8 percent
• Metuchen, 213 to 141, -33.8 percent
• Woodbridge, 1,871 to 1,739, -8.1 percent

Most larceny occurs because vehicles are left unlocked or with valuables left in view, according to Rodger. “Cell phones constitute one of the largest larceny categories and impacts that number significantly, even though they may not have actually been stolen,” he said via email. “Cell providers don’t usually replace damaged or lost phones, but do if they are ‘stolen.’  This creates a false statistical escalation that really isn’t justified,” he said. Rodger hopes the new National Incident-Based Report System (NIBRS) will address that. The UCR is being phased out and Rahway is one of the pilots for the new system, which may explain the lack of December data in the UCR, according to Rodger.

In his State of the City address last year, Mayor Raymond Giacobbe, Jr. said that by the end of the year, cameras will be installed downtown that are linked directly to the Police Department. Rodger said that’s a pilot program that he hopes to have installed over the next three months, involving a point-to-point wireless mesh system. It will originate at City Hall and will build from site to site, he said, with the ability to grow from any node on the system.

Statistically, downtown is not a high crime area, Rodger said. “We spend a lot of time downtown, have a mandatory walking post downtown, mandatory train station details, and have several cameras deployed downtown which we will be expanding upon very soon,” he said. There’s also the SafeCam program and proliferation of home recording systems that he said helps tremendously.

As part of the Safe program, the city was able to purchase Ring camera systems at an extremely low price on the Ring network and deploy them downtown, according to Rodger. It’s a partnership with business downtown in which the Police Department can use their Internet to make the connection to the cloud, he said. Currently, there are 10 deployed but because of connectivity issues are not necessarily active. The Police Department is still seeking partnerships to deploy more units but it doesn’t necessarily have to be downtown and a waiver is required.