Anchorage police Sgt. Josh Nolder told a crowd of about 50 Eagle River residents that his department's data shows crime declining in the suburban community. But the official numbers did not curb their fears; they spent most of the two-hour meeting telling personal stories about witnessing criminal behavior or being a victim of it.
Nolder shared Anchorage Police Department crime statistics covering January 2015 to March 2016, a long enough period to establish short-term trends, he said.
Over the year and three months, Eagle River and Chugiak saw declines in the categories of theft, burglary and vandalism, according to the data. The two neighborhoods didn't generate enough robbery and rape reports to establish any trends in those categories, Nolder said.
Most of those categories showed an upward trend for Anchorage over the same period, according to the data. Thefts remained static.
Nolder was quick to point out that while spikes in the data may seem alarming, Eagle River and Chugiak offer much smaller sample pools to draw from.
"These crimes are not always trending down. That's not always what's happening," Nolder told the crowd. "It's what the data currently shows, and people may be more aware of things because of social media."
Facebook groups of locals tracking and sharing stories about crimes were recalled frequently throughout the meeting. Users of the pages, such as Eagle River Crime Watch and Chugiak-Eagle River Crime Watch, praised the sharing of information but wondered if more could be done.
Eagle River resident Joan Hamilton said she watched two people inject drugs in front of a pizzeria. An increased number of aggressive panhandlers prompted her to buy another gun, she said.
Hamilton said she uses the social media pages but she thinks residents can take extra steps to clean up the town too. She recalled a community patrol established by several businesses a few years ago. The man behind the patrol retired, she said.
"Could something like that happen again?" she asked, adding that the patrol wasn't vigilante-like.
Local representatives to the Anchorage Assembly Amy Demboski and Bill Starr sponsored the meeting. Demboski said earlier Tuesday that she noticed a "dramatic increase" in calls from constituents over the last three to four months regarding burglaries, thefts and drug crimes in Eagle River.
Frustrated business owners have expressed a desire to take matters into their own hands and adopt a vigilante approach to catching criminals, Demboski said. She hoped to defuse some of that tension by getting residents and the Anchorage Police Department together.
Before seeing the data firsthand, Demboski said there was no doubt that "the feel of Eagle River is changing." She believes part of the problem came along with new high-density housing. Panhandlers and public inebriation are far more common than in the past, she said.
"There is no question that the problems plaguing the rest of Anchorage are migrating," Demboski said.
Longtime Eagle River resident Scott Bailey echoed Demboski's statement about homelessness becoming more visible. This year for the first time, he said, panhandlers have approached him and other shoppers in local grocery store parking lots.
And the drug use mentioned by Hamilton and others is a known problem to officials. City Parks and Recreation Director John Rodda said the increased drug use "is beyond anything this community has seen. Ever." The vandalism and drug paraphernalia littering the parks have been magnified through the rapid growth of the problem, he said.
But it's hard to catch people in the act. Police are often called after the fact, Rodda said. As a result, the city has started using cameras in some public spaces.
Meeting attendee John "LJ" Kennedy encouraged the use of technology to combat the supposed spike in crime.
"We already have all these social media pages, which are community watches per se," Kennedy said. "We also have technology we can use like cameras … We should use those and hand that information over to police."