Oconee one of the safer counties, most crime rates drop

By the numbers, Oconee County is one of the safer counties in the upstate, Sheriff Mike Crenshaw said Tuesday. Its crime rates in all areas are trending downward, Crenshaw said, and the current rates compare to Abbeville County, south of Anderson County, which has roughly one-third the population of Oconee County. “That’s something we can all be proud of,” Crenshaw said. In a presentation before the Oconee County Council Tuesday, Crenshaw paraded an army of data, in most areas covering trends over the last 16-18 years. One consistency in his over 30 years in law enforcement, Crenshaw said, is that a four-square mile block of the 29678 area code, around Seneca, was the scene of 50 percent of the county’s reported crimes. There, Crenshaw said, is where the numbers and common sense dictated his department should concentrate limited resources. But the numbers were still moving in the right direction. In violent crime − murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault − the fifteen years from 2002 to 2017 had seen the overall rate per 10,000 residents halved. Aggravated assaults had seen the largest drop, from 353 reported cases in 2007 to 144 cases in 2017. Property crimes were also trending downward, Crenshaw said, and domestic violence cases had dropped from 240 to 162 over a five-year period. In some cases, he added, legislative changes had contributed greatly to the decrease in crimes. Drugs continue to be the constant problem, the sheriff reported, with newer and more powerful narcotics finding their way to the streets. Prescription drugs, too, continue to appear in high volume, with 82,400 prescriptions for pain medication filled in Oconee County in 2018, over 3.6 million pills in all. But even that was trending downward.