PRINCETON: Crime stats list drops in local towns

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Reported crime in the township and the borough declined in 2011 amid a drop in violent offenses and burglaries, the annual Uniform Crime Report showed Friday.
   The report, a compilation of violent and nonviolent crimes reported for all New Jersey municipalities, found that the township had a crime rate of 10.1 victims per 1,000 residents, compared to the borough at 31.8. Both numbers are lower than in 2010.
   The report breaks out violent crime into four categories: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. In both towns, there were no murders or rapes in 2011. The township had the same number of robberies, three, as it did in 2010, while the borough went from four to two. The borough had eight aggravated assaults, down from 17 in 2010. Seeing a similar drop, the township went from 10 aggravated assaults to none last year.
   It was not immediately clear if the rape category, as used and defined by the state, covered the same types of sex offenses that occurred on the Princeton University campus last year. The university, in its own crime report released in earlier in the fall, self-reported 16 “forcible” sex offenses.
   As for nonviolent crime, the borough reported 44 burglaries in 2011, compared with 65 the year before. The burglary total in the township also went down, from 40 in 2010 to 34 in 2011. Car thefts in the borough went from five in 2010 to three last year, while the township had two car thefts, the same as in 2010.
   Township Mayor Chad Goerner on Monday called the crime reduction “great news.” He said with the two departments merging due to consolidation, officials will be even “more efficient and effective in managing our public safety.”
   Neither Borough Chief David J. Dudeck nor Township acting-chief Lt. Christopher J. Morgan could be reached for comment on the report.
   Neighboring West Windsor also saw crime go down, where the crime rate went from 15.2 to 14.7. Violent crimes remained mostly unchanged, from 12 to 14; there were no murders, one rape, six robberies and seven aggravated assaults. Burglaries also remained mostly unchanged, from 47 to 46. Car thefts rose from nine to 17.
   Overall in New Jersey, the crime rate went up by 3 percent, while the crime rate for Mercer County rose by less than 1 percent. Of the 13 municipalities in the county, crime went up in seven of them — Ewing, Hightstown, Hopewell Borough, Hopewell Township, Lawrence, Trenton and Robbinsville — and went down or stayed close to the same in the others.
   Most towns in the county, a mix of primarily rural and suburban municipalities, have low levels of violent crime. Except for Trenton and Hamilton, no community had more than 85 violent crimes last year. By comparison, Trenton, the second largest municipality in the county behind Hamilton, averaged around 100 violent offenses a month, the report showed.
   Trenton also accounted for 23 of the 25 murders in the county; the other two were in Ewing. The overall murder total for the county was up from 20 murders in 2010.