By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

Phillip Umphenour believes the new streetlight the city installed this past year at 18th Street and Sergeant Avenue has made his neighborhood safer.

“People can walk around more and not have to worry about being in the dark and getting mugged,” Umphenour, 61, told the Globe.

The retired FAG Bearings Corp. employee has lived in the 1700 block of South Sergeant Avenue since 1976. He said his neighborhood was a little “rough” in the 1970s and 1980s. But he’s never had much of a problem with property crimes, he said.

Having good lights in his back yard and on his street helps, Umphenour believes.

Ask Robert Foster, 71, over in the 1400 block of Byers Avenue, about a new streetlight on his corner.

“It was dark down there,” Foster said. “You couldn’t see nothing before. Someone could park down there and walk up into your house before you knew it.”

He said the light seems to have cut down on suspicious traffic on his block.

Police Chief Lane Roberts attributes part of an 18 percent decrease in property crimes and a 15 percent drop in the overall crime rate in Joplin in 2008 to the city’s streetlight program. The city installed additional streetlights in eight police sub-beats the past two years using revenues from a half-cent public-safety sales tax approved by voters in November 2006.

“Every place we’ve put streetlights, we’ve been seeing reductions in crime of up to 30 percent,” Roberts said.

The Joplin Police Department released statistics this week suggesting that reductions in property crimes, such as burglary, larceny, vehicle theft and arson, and in the one violent crime that involves a dollar loss to victims, robbery, saved residents almost $2 million in losses in 2008.

The department estimated the dollar loss for all crimes in the city in 2007 at $9.3 million. The figure for 2008 was $7.3 million. The estimates were obtained by multiplying the number of offenses in each category by the national average of dollar loss for each type of crime as reported by the FBI using Uniform Crime Reporting system data.

Boosting the city’s number of police officers has been a big contributing factor in the decline in property crimes, Roberts said. The city has added 23 officers with the revenues from the public-safety sales tax, with seven more to be hired soon. Eight of those hired are still going through training, but 15 are trained and out on the streets.

“I think that’s a lot of it,” Roberts said. “But I don’t want to underestimate the value of a change in philosophy.”

He said the Police Department has been focusing on the causes of crime in the city’s neighborhoods and not just the symptoms. The approach has helped to increase residents’ involvement and their willingness to report crimes, he said. Calls increased by 8 percent and arrests by 11 percent in 2008.

The only property crime to increase was arson, jumping from 35 offenses in 2007 to 46 in 2008. Burglaries fell from 1,315 to 693, vehicle thefts declined from 413 to 313 and larcenies, which include thefts from vehicles, dropped from 3,554 to 3,308. Robberies also fell from 91 two years ago to 55 last year.

A declining national economy apparently has yet to impact property crimes in Joplin negatively, the police chief said.

“The economy didn’t really start taking a nosedive until the middle of last year,” Roberts said. “So, the economic downturn didn’t impact the crime stats during most of last year.”

The one negative side of the city’s statistics for 2008 came in violent crimes, which increased 6 percent. That particular category of crimes includes murders, assaults, robberies and sex offenses.

Roberts said the overall decline has continued through the first quarter of this year, with another 11 percent drop. He said the Police Department hopes to sustain the trend through the end of this year, but the economy could become a larger factor.

He emphasized that the figures released this week concern just two years of data. The police chief said he would feel better about a decline sustained over a four-to-five-year period.

The largest dollar loss for Joplin residents comes from larcenies, an estimated $2.9 million last year. The dollar loss for burglaries is estimated at almost $1.4 million, for vehicle thefts at $2.1 million, for arsons at $795,000, and for robberies about $73,000.