Reported crime incidents dropped in November, making it the second-lowest month since November last year. However, neighborhoods, which see less crime than the retail and commercial areas, were harder hit.
 
Thefts were lower than last month, always the highest-incident category, but still very near the twelve-month average (60.3). However, two-thirds of those incidents were for shoplifting, which means someone was apprehended.
 
Quite often commercial areas see other types of theft besides shoplifting. This month was similar but more thefts were in neighborhood areas than we usually see. The incident may be something stolen for a garage, carport, back of vehicle, or an incident other than burglary. On the counter side, residential burglaries were actually down lower than any point for more than a year.
 
There was a rise in the number of non-residential burglaries but all were confined to three properties. The apartments at Campbell and SH-190 accounted for 75% of those crimes. Incidents at District 1 apartments are rare so for one complex to be hit several times, almost all reported on the same day, is very unusual and very unfortunate for the residents there.
 
Violent crime was limited to only one incident, a business robbery.
 
On a related note, the Dallas Morning News yesterday reported that the Dallas Police Dept was not properly reporting crimes as set by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program. In Garland, Police Chief Mitch Bates has reviewed our reporting methods with the Council several times and has always indicated that we make every attempt to follow the FBI guidelines precisely. We did discover last year that we were not accurately reporting our numbers to the FBI but the mistake was caused by a software bug. That was corrected soon after it was discovered. We had accurate data but it wasn't being reported accurately. The data used for this monthly report comes directly from the officers' data, not through the FBI UCR numbers.
 
If you want to review the areas that have reported incidents over the last month, download the complete report here for address-by-address information that includes your neighborhood.