Auto burglaries and fatal overdoses in Hamilton County both dropped in 2023, while child abuse cases increased.
Mayor Weston Wamp's office released the year-end results of its Hamilton Counted report, which tracks key data from across the county on homelessness, crime and overdoses. Released March 12, the document compares totals from 2023 to 2022.
Crime
Hamilton County witnessed a 21% decline in auto burglaries in 2023, dropping from 3,285 in 2022 to 2,582.
"Auto burglaries have historically been a problem, and they're just a huge nuisance," Hamilton County District Attorney Coty Wamp, the county mayor's sister, said in a phone interview. "There's really nothing like going out to your car in the morning and finding you've been burglarized."
Wamp said she hopes she can give a tiny bit of credit to a series of billboards her office placed around the city last year. The billboards remind people not to leave firearms in their cars. In North Georgia as well as Hamilton and Bradley counties, Wamp said, law enforcement have also taken a handful of people off the streets that may be responsible for many of the local auto burglaries.
"Just locking your car door at night is so significant," she said. "Most people are not going to break your window -- that would alert people to the burglary. It would wake people up at night. They really just go from car to car and pull on the handle slowly to see if it's unlocked."
(READ MORE: Chattanooga-area billboards target gun theft from vehicles)
If the door is locked, she said, thieves oftentimes move on to the next vehicle. A large majority of auto burglaries are for the purpose of stealing guns, Wamp said.
"My car has been broken into on the North Shore multiple times, and they'll leave valuables," she said. "It used to be people were looking for cash and cellphones. Nowadays, these individuals are a majority of the time looking for guns. That's the only purpose of doing it. And then they use them or they sell them."
The year-end report notes the town of East Ridge changed records management systems in August 2022, and as a result, its 2022 data is not available and wasn't included in the listed crime rates. Other notable takeaways from across the county:
— Auto theft dropped 2.7% from 1,469 incidents to 1,429.
— Aggravated assaults dropped 1.6% from 1,701 to 1,674.
— Burglaries dropped 13% from 1,400 to 1,218.
— Robberies dropped 13.3% from 240 to 208.
— Rapes dropped 4.4% from 158 to 151.
— There were 32 murders in 2023, which was the same number as in 2022.
— There were 93 nonfatal shootings in Hamilton County, 85 of which occurred in Chattanooga.
— Hamilton County's per capita violent crime rate in 2022 was 60.4, which was in line with Tennessee's per capita rate of 62.2. The United States has a per capital violent crime rate of 38.1.
— Hamilton County saw a 6.6% increase in child abuse cases in 2023, rising from 2,801 to 3,000. The state, meanwhile, saw a 5.5% decline, dropping from 70,350 in 2022 to 66,497. In 2023, 4.5% of the child abuse cases in Tennessee came from Hamilton County.
Overdoses
There were 206 fatal overdoses in Hamilton County in 2023, averaging 55 deaths per 100,000 people. That's a nearly 9% decrease from the prior year's total of 226.
(READ MORE: Chattanooga overdoses steady in 2022 after pandemic spike)
The year-end report includes a heat map of the places in Hamilton County with the highest concentration of overdoses and fatal overdoses broken down by ZIP code.
The East Lake area, 37407, had the highest concentration of fatal overdoses, the report states. The majority of those occurred in residences. The East Brainerd and Hickory Valley areas, ZIP code 37421, had the largest number of overdose incidents, most having occurred at a residence or an extended-stay hotel.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has said can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin, has been a growing reason behind the county's fatal overdoses. The drug was listed as a cause behind 70% of the county's suspected drug-related deaths in 2023, up from 26% in 2018.
Homelessness
Hamilton County's Homeless Health Care Center, which sits across from the Chatt Foundation on East 11th Street, saw a nearly 4% increase in patients in 2023, rising from 1,569 in 2022 to 1,627 in 2023. Most of the visits had to do with people grappling with tobacco use disorder, depression or high blood pressure.
(READ MORE: After numbers jumped during pandemic, Hamilton County homeless population drops 31%)
A January 2023 count found the county's sheltered and unsheltered homeless population dropped 31% -- 1,144 in 2022 to 785 in 2023 -- after a spike during the pandemic. Mackenzie Kelly, of the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition, said in a text she expects the results of the January 2024 count will likely be finalized sometime in the next couple weeks.
Social services
The report also tracks the number of people in Hamilton County using the federal government's supplemental nutrition assistance program, which helps poor families pay for food.
Hamilton County's 2023 data is only available through September, the report states, but it shows a consistent decline throughout the year in the number of people using the program, dropping from 39,225 in January to 33,036 in September. That is after the number of people using the benefit consistently hovered between 38,000 and 42,000 per month in 2022.
In 2023, the report notes, 17,990 children in Hamilton County received food assistance from the federal government. Across the state, 352,059 children received the benefit -- a number almost equal to Hamilton County's total population of approximately 370,000 people.
The county also saw an 18.4% increase in the average number of residents participating per month in the federal Women, Infants and Children program, which offers food aid and nutrition education to low-income mothers and children up to 5 years old. The number of monthly participants increased from 6,206 in 2022 to 7,346 in 2023.
Contact David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.