Police report: Most crime down; robbery and rape up

Boulder City continues to be an extraordinarily safe place to live.

That was the main gist of the message put forward by BCPD Chief Tim Shea in his annual report to the city council last week.

“We’ve seen quite a drop in crime over the past 15, 20 years,” he said.

Notwithstanding the fact that most crime categories were down in 2024 when compared to 2023, two areas were up sharply and they are both violent crimes: robbery and rape. After no reported robberies in 2022 or 2023, four were reported in 2024 and rape reports were up from two to seven. Although the stats were shown on the screen, Shea did not address these categories specifically and no council member questioned him on the subject.

According to Shea, the department has 39 full-time commissioned officers, nine part-time marshals and 19 1/2 non-commissioned full-time staff. (The code enforcement position is split 50/50 with the community development department. In addition, there are 21 part-time non-commissioned employees and 18 volunteers.)

“You’ll see there’s quite an increase in vagrancy and panhandling and begging,” Shea reported, adding that there is not a specific category for that in the report but that it shows up in calls about “suspicious people”. “So you can see it went from 674 up to 1,538. But a lot of those are. We get multiple calls on a suspicious person. We’ll get five, six calls a day on the same person as the shift goes on and then the next shift comes on and they’ll get another call.”

Another area that is up substantially is juvenile runaways.

“A big part of that number is because of St. Jude’s and the runaways from there,” Shea explained. “So you can see we went from 29 two years ago to 79. We were 98 last year. So it is having a bit of an impact on us.”

In the same week that the union representing police officers issued an open letter on social media expressing no-confidence in City Attorney Brittany Walker and calling for her dismissal over issues surrounding a new collective bargaining agreement with the city, Shea addressed succession planning — an issue the letter brought up as well in terms of vacant positions.

The letter claimed that four officers have recently left and have not been replaced and that two are out due to injuries. It further claimed that 11 officers are seeking new jobs outside of Boulder City due to pay issues.

“Succession planning is always an issue for us as we develop our people for the future,” Shea said. “We’re getting a pretty good handle on this now. When I started here a few years ago, there really was none. It was non-existent.”

In terms of other challenges, Shea pointed to the nearly 100-year-old police headquarters and referenced efforts to replace it that began back in the 1970s —about 50 years ago.

“There’s been two prior attempts for a new police facility that started in the ’70s. So, they knew in the ’70s that this probably wasn’t going to last forever here, but we’re still there,” he said.