Lebanon – Highest Crime Rate in N.H.
By Riley Yates
WASHINGTON, Oct. 31, 2002–Lebanon, in west-central New Hampshire near the Vermont border, had the highest crime rate of any city in the Granite State last year, according to the annual FBI crime report released this week.
Lebanon saw 42.4 crimes per 1,000 people in 2001, compared to an average of 23.4 per 1,000 in other New Hampshire cities with populations above 10,000. Concord and Nashua were not included in the study because they did not submit complete data.
Of the 544 crimes reported in Lebanon, 449 of them were cases of theft or larceny, such as cashing bad checks. There were many fewer violent crimes reported in the city – five rapes, one robbery and nine cases of aggravated assault – giving Lebanon a lower violent crime rate than the rest of the state. New Hampshire ranks in the lowest five in the nation in that category.
Jim Alexander, a spokesman for the Lebanon police, said Thursday that the city’s high number of property crimes are probably attributable to the large number of people who pass through it each day.
Lebanon has the biggest retail base of all the North Country, Alexander said. The number of people in the city swells during the day as Vermont residents shop there to avoid paying their state’s sales tax. By all estimates, he said, the city’s population of 13,000 at least doubles during business hours.
“If you are going to burglarize, you’re going to come here,” Alexander said. “We have a huge group of people during the day, and that brings a lot of crime. Where there [are] more people, there is more opportunity.”
Burglaries, another category in the FBI report, appear to be on the increase in 2002, Alexander said. From January through September 2002, Lebanon police reported 54 burglaries, he said. For all of last year, there were 51.
The city also saw a murder in 2002, when 19-year-old Corey Brink was shot and killed in an apartment parking lot on Sept. 22.
But in many crimes, Alexander said, Lebanon appears to be seeing a decrease. In the first 9 months of 2001, there were 495 thefts and cases of larceny. During the same period in 2002, those crimes had dropped to 466, he said.
“Some crimes are rising, others falling,” Alexander said. “It seems about the same overall.”
Published in The Manchester Union Leader, in New Hampshire.
