Crime grants benefit community

Lying in the middle of the consent agenda for the Chapel Hill Town Council on Monday night was an item to authorize matching funds for a state grant.

The item garnered no discussion at the meeting, but the money already has produced tangible results in the community.

In April, the council approved a pair of grants from the Governor's Crime Commission that will give the Chapel Hill Police Department grants of $51,617 and $100,863 in the next two years, including sums of $48,134 and $75,594 this year. The town already has received this year's money.

For the fiscal year 2004-05, which began July 1, the town was expected to provide $16,044 and $18,899 in matching funds, respectively, for the grants. To remain eligible for the funding, the town must match funds from the grant every year it wants to use that money.

The smaller grant was given to enable the police department to create and analyze crime maps. The other has enabled it to hire a bilingual victim specialist to serve Hispanic victims of crimes in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Gregg Jarvies, Chapel Hill police chief, said the money was overdue. "There have been a lot of situations where a crime occurred and there were difficulties communicating with the victims," he said.

According to the N.C. Latino Health Task Force, more than 13 percent of Carrboro's total population is Latino or Hispanic.

The department hired former Chapel Hill police officer Charlie Pardo to address the needs of that growing section of the community.

"Charlie acquired a lot of contacts while he was a police officer here," Jarvies said. "The first step is for him to get back out in the community and reach out to those contacts."

Pardo works with El Centro Latino in Carrboro, and his position only involves working with Latino victims of domestic disputes and sexual assaults at the moment.

Pardo said he wants to encourage Latinos to contact the police if they are victims of a domestic dispute or sexual assault. Those crimes often go unreported in the Latino community, he said.

While the police department has been able to take advantage of the first grant, it has not yet been able to make use of the other.

Jane Cousins, police spokeswoman and the person in charge of implementing the new mapping system, said Tuesday that the department couldn't use the grant money until the council had passed the proposal.

The system will enable officers to access information from their cars about trends and patterns of crime in their patrol areas - a technology that has previously been unavailable in Chapel Hill.

Cousins said all officers soon will be able to analyze data and make predictions about where certain crimes will occur. Officers also will be able to identify crime "hot spots" based on the patterns the mapping system displays, which only a select few officers were able to do before.

She added that the long-term goal is to have crime mapping capabilities on the department's Web site.

Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.