Crime in North Riverside rose 5.5 percent in 2008, largely due to increases in property crimes, including burglary and theft.

Statistics released recently by the North Riverside Police Department are the village’s annual Uniform Crime Report, which is compiled for all police agencies in Illinois by the state police. The report tracks numbers in eight separate categories: murder, criminal sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault/battery, burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft and arson.

In 2007, the number of reportable crimes in North Riverside fell by a fraction over the previous year. But in 2008, a jump in thefts sent the village’s total number of reportable incidents to 894, its highest since 2004.

“We can tell our residents all day long about ways to prevent thefts, but for the people that come to the restaurants and malls, it’s tough to get the word to them,” said Police Chief Anthony Garvey.

Thefts, especially thefts from vehicles, were a particular problem late in the year, Garvey said.

“It started in November and went right through the holidays,” Garvey said.

Neighboring Riverside saw a similar increase in the number of thefts reported in 2008. In that village, theft incidents rose by 115 percent. In North Riverside, thefts rose by only 6.3 percent.

But many more thefts are committed annually in North Riverside due to its large commercial district and the number of visitors who come in by car every day of the year. Riverside reported 114 thefts (mainly from unlocked vehicles) in 2008, whereas North Riverside reported 804 thefts, more than half of those (425) coming from the North Riverside Park mall alone.

So, while Riverside saw a huge increase in thefts on a percentage basis, the actual number of thefts increased by a total of 61. In North Riverside, thefts increased year over year in 2008 by 48. Overall the number of crimes reported in North Riverside in 2008 was up by 47 from 2007, so the increase in overall crime can be traced directly to the increase in thefts.

According to Garvey, a large percentage of theft complaints in the village come from people who have lost items at the shopping centers, such as purses and cellphones, and need a report for insurance purposes.

But burglaries also increased in North Riverside in 2008 by 24 percent, jumping from 29 incidents the previous year to 36. Again, many of those incidents were related to the commercial district. In 2008 and still in 2009, police have been seeing an uptick in smash-and-grab type burglaries from vehicles parked in shopping center lots.

It takes a matter of seconds for someone to shatter a car window and grab a purse, briefcase or laptop computer from a car seat.

“Burglaries are a very difficult crime to detect,” Garvey said. “But if there’s a crew working the area, when you do make one arrest, you can clear a lot of cases.”

The arrest numbers tell the story on how difficult it is to catch burglary suspects. In 2008, North Riverside police made no arrests related to any of the 36 cases reported. In 2007, police made just two arrests.

Theft, on the other hand, is a much tougher way for someone to make a living in North Riverside. Police made 418 theft arrests in 2008, the vast majority (over 360) of those for retail theft.

“Thefts are reported because of actually catching someone,” Garvey said, though the village also has its share of delayed theft reports, which often don’t lead to an arrest.

“A lot of times the stores don’t realize they’ve lost something until they do an audit,” Garvey said.

Violent crime was down overall in North Riverside, despite a slight uptick in aggravated assault/battery cases, from 14 in 2007 to 17 in 2008. Robbery was down 44 percent to 10 incidents in 2008. In 2007, there were 18 robberies reported, the highest number in at least a decade.

“I was surprised over the holiday season,” Garvey said. “We had anticipated more armed robberies and street robberies, and we had increased patrols to combat that.”

There were also no murders reported in the village last year, and for the third straight year, no criminal sexual assault cases were reported.

While not part of the Uniform Crime Report’s crime index calculations, North Riverside also saw an increase in drug arrests in 2008, from 17 to 23.