Even criminals find springtime renewing

MAT-SU — As the Mat-Su Valley thaws and a winter’s worth of snow melts, residents are getting out more; trails are seeing more hikers, backyards, more barbecues.

The same seems to be true for the Valley’s criminal element.

Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney with the Palmer Police Department said summer is just generally busier for police.

“It happens every year,” Turney said. “It seems like when the … weather warms up and the sunlight’s out a little more, things kind of pick up.”

Burglaries, he said, seem to show a marked increase, although not as much in Palmer as for the Valley in general. Some of that could be chalked up to folks with summer cabins coming back to the Valley and discovering damage done over the winter.

Generally, he said that in the same way summer brings out more hikers and tourists, it also brings out more burglars and criminals. Events like police pursuits — suspects running from the law — also seem to follow the same pattern of a few in the winter, more in the spring and summer and then an up-tick in the fall.

Turney calls that fall crime push the “last hurrah.”

Localized statistics for crime are hard to come by and were unavailable as of press time. But according to statistics from the state’s Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Alaska State Troopers, burglaries at least seem to follow a sine-wave-type pattern.

Burglaries and robberies are low in the winter, rise over the summer, then fall again over the winter. From 2002 through 2005, burglaries were highest in the state in July and August. In 2006, the last year available on the state’s Web site, the highest number of burglaries happened in September. That appears to be the exception rather than the rule.

Sgt. Robert French with the Alaska State Troopers said that locally, spikes in burglaries can be generated by who’s active.

“We get a huge spike in burglaries, but it’s all due to usually a relatively small group of individuals,” French said.

When troopers take those perpetrators down, he said the spike subsides. While he doesn’t work patrol duty like he used to, French has worked 12 years in the Valley and said that from his perspective, some crimes are seasonal. When school’s out, for example, petty crimes like vandalism seem to rise. But with fewer parents on the road, morning traffic accidents decrease.

In Palmer, Lt. Tom Remaley backs up Turney’s statement that burglaries seem to go up.

“When you have more people on the road or more people out doing things there’s always a flipside to doing that, unfortunately,” Turney said.

As to how this year will look compared to years past, Turney said he’s bracing himself for a busy summer. “Because the economy’s not the greatest right now and people don’t have a lot of money to be going Outside for vacations … more people will be spending their time locally.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner-@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.