‘The Strangest Year’

Hoover police Chief Nick Derzis said 2020 was the strangest year he’s ever seen in his 40-plus years as a police officer, but it resulted in some positive crime trends for the city.

Total offenses in categories reported to the FBI were down 16% in 2020 from 4,458 to 3,749, police records indicate.

Crime was down almost across the board, and Derzis attributes a lot of that to the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a dramatic decrease in people’s movement and activities, particularly in the spring and early summer.

However, Derzis was particularly impressed with the decrease in robberies, which declined 30% from 27 to 19. That’s a small number of robberies for a city with an estimated population of 88,675.

National rates for 2020 were not yet available, but the 2019 national rate of robberies for cities with a population between 50,000 and 100,000 was 75.8 robberies per 100,000 people, according to FBI crime statistics. Hoover’s rate for 2020 was 21.4 robberies per 100,000 people.

While many crimes would naturally decline during business and community shutdowns, robbery is a crime that could easily have escalated due to people losing employment and getting desperate, Derzis said.

He was very pleased to see the decline in 2020, especially given that the 27 robberies in 2019 already were the lowest amount in Hoover in 20-plus years.

Hoover police Lt. Keith Czeskleba said it wasn’t too long ago — in 2012 — that Hoover had 11 robberies in one month. “So to have 19 for the entire year is truly remarkable,” Czeskleba said.

Burglaries, after falling 48% in 2019, dropped another 8% in 2020, from 124 to 114. That’s another crime category that is far below the national average. The 2019 national rate for burglaries in cities the size of Hoover was 317.8 per 100,000 people, while Hoover’s rate in 2020 was 128.6 per 100,000 people.

HOMICIDES

Hoover had four homicides in 2020 (4.5 per 100,000 people), slightly above the national rate of 3.8 per 100,000 people.

One of those was the highly publicized shooting of 8-year-old Royta Giles in the Riverchase Galleria on July 3. The youngster was struck and killed by a stray bullet fired in a confrontation between six young men. Three men from Birmingham were charged with murder and are awaiting trial.

There were two vehicular homicides on Sept. 10 when a man driving a GMC truck plowed into the back of a Honda Fit on U.S. 31 in front of the Hoover Square shopping center, killing 8-year-old Serris Prude and her 11-year-old brother, Emrhye Prude, both of whom were in the back seat of the Honda. Authorities charged the 46-year-old driver of the truck, Christopher Shane Anagnos, with two counts of murder, saying he was under the influence of a controlled substance.

The fourth homicide of 2020 happened at The Park at Wellington and Wakefield apartment complex off Tyler Road on Valentine’s Day.

Shemethia Tynise Coteat, 41, was shot four times from behind as she was getting groceries out of the back seat of her vehicle in the parking lot just before 7 p.m., police said. Witnesses reported seeing a dark-colored four-door vehicle speeding away from the scene, police said. Police have strong leads in the case but not enough to get any arrest warrants.

“We have not stopped working the case, and we’re not going to until we get what we need,” Czeskleba said. “Hoover has not had a homicide that police consider unsolved since 2004, and we’re going to do everything we can to resolve that one as well.”

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Many people predicted there would be an increase in domestic violence due to people being at home with family members for so long and having limited social contact with others, but Hoover police actually had a 5% drop in domestic violence assaults in 2020 (from 465 to 441) and a 15% drop in other domestic incidents (416 to 354).

There also was an 11% decline in other kinds of assaults, from 348 in 2019 to 308 in 2020. Forcible sex offenses decreased from 20 to 15, including a decline in rapes (from 13 to nine).

The number of drug offenses reported dropped 35% from 732 to 474. That’s likely not because people weren’t using drugs; they just weren’t getting caught with them as much, Derzis said.

So many drug arrests come from traffic stops where people have illegal drugs on them or in their vehicle, and there were a lot fewer traffic stops in 2020 because more people were staying home, particularly in the spring and early summer.

The number of traffic tickets issued in 2020 was down pretty significantly as well compared to other years, Derzis said.

There were 55 drug overdoses reported to Hoover police in 2020, compared to 41 in 2019, and 14 of those 2020 cases ended in death, compared to 12 drug overdose deaths in 2019, police said.

Derzis said he believes there likely were more drug overdoses that went unreported, especially since so many more people these days have Narcan to combat the effects of an overdose.

Other crimes that saw decreases in 2020 were buying and receiving stolen property (down 54%), motor vehicle thefts (down 9%), other thefts (down 16%), weapons law violations (down 26%), counterfeiting/forgery (down 18%), embezzlement (down 39%) and fraud (down 3%).

There was a 200% increase in extortion and blackmail, from three cases to nine. Most of those were situations where people got in trouble with online activity, such as sending pictures of themselves in compromising positions to people they don’t know and then being threatened that the pictures would be shared with family members or others if the person in the picture didn’t pay a certain amount of money, Czeskleba said.

There also was a small increase in vandalism in Hoover in 2020, from 230 cases to 244.

Derzis noted a 3% increase in thefts from motor vehicles (363 to 375) and said it likely was because more people were working from home, thus increasing the number of vehicles in town that were potential targets for thieves.

People need to heed the advice of police to simply lock their vehicle doors, even when their vehicles are in their own carport or driveway, he said. That simple act greatly lessens the likelihood that a thief will steal something because many thieves don’t want to take the chance of setting off an alarm by breaking a window or jimmying a car door lock, particularly in a neighborhood, he said.

Still, there probably is at least one gun stolen per week from unlocked vehicles in Hoover, Derzis said.

GALLERIA SECURITY

Following the July 3 fatal shooting at the Riverchase Galleria, Hoover police increased their presence at the mall and will continue that increased presence, Derzis said. “That’s going to be a full-time deal.”

He declined to give specifics so as not to tip off troublemakers but did say police have reactivated a substation at the mall and use it regularly.

The management team at the Galleria also has taken steps to increase security, bringing in dogs that can detect firearms and beefing up communication with Hoover police, Derzis said.

“We know they’re doing everything they can to try to protect the public with proper security,” the chief said. “We’ll continue to be very supportive of them so that it is a safe place to shop.”

Also in 2020, Hoover police also had to deal with protests that were held in cities across the nation in conjunction with the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Minneapolis black man who died May 25 while being handcuffed and put on the ground with a police officer’s knee on his neck.

While surrounding law enforcement agencies did provide support for Hoover police as they at times dealt with hundreds of protesters, Derzis said the protests did not stop Hoover police from being able to keep the city safe.

“We’re large enough,” he said. “Whatever takes place here we can handle.”

COVID-19 IMPACT

Perhaps the bigger challenge was managing the COVID-19 disease. Many civilian employees began working remotely for a while once the pandemic hit, but obviously that was not possible for the patrol division, which deals daily with the public, sometimes in a hands-on way, Derzis said. The city secured personal protection equipment for all staff, and Derzis said he’s not sure how long the use of face masks will be mandated.

Seventy-one Hoover Police Department employees — nearly a third of the department — had to be quarantined at some point in 2020 due to either testing positive for COVID-19 or having close contact with someone else who tested positive, Derzis said. Thankfully, there were no significant health issues that required hospitalization, he said.

“No one anticipated a worldwide pandemic when we started the year,” he said. “We certainly hope our crime stats for ’21 will echo ’20 because we’re satisfied with them. We started off the year relatively calm overall, but again, we’re not sure what’s going to happen with the pandemic.”

While the pandemic played a role in 2020’s drop in crime, Derzis also credits the department’s efforts to partner with the community to combat crime. Police are using social media and neighborhood watch groups to build better two-way communication with residents, and those efforts likely are beginning to result in crime reduction.