With three months to go in 2023, property crime in Hamilton Count was down more than 20% from 2022 and violent crime down more than 2%.
Sexual assault calls and exams in the county fell from 116 in July, August and September of 2022 to 70 this year. Substance abuse fatal overdoses from Jan. 1 to Sept. 30 fell from 165 in 2022 to 157 in 2023, a drop of 4.8%. And even the cumulative patients at the Homeless Health Care Center have fallen by nine.
So is Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp giddy about the results? Not exactly.
He is “cautiously optimistic” about the numbers, he said, but is happier the county is reporting data in a more consistent way than it has done in the past.
“We wanted to distill data in a responsible manner,” Wamp said of “Hamilton Counted,” the monthly statistical report on trends such as crime, drug and sexual abuse, and homelessness that his administration began during the summer, “because it can be distorted.”