Lafayette Parish Crime Stats Show Slight Drops In Most Offenses

Today, Lafayette Parish Sheriff Mark Garber released the federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for Lafayette Parish crimes for 2017.

The UCR details stats for eight offense categories for the past 5 years of recorded data. The chart provided includes the number of offenses per category and the number of cases cleared for each category.

The Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office investigated 2,511 criminal cases during the 2017 calendar year. That shows approximately a 10-percent decrease over 2016 that saw 2,784 total criminal cases. That statistic shows a steady decrease since 2014.

The parish's 2017 criminal homicides dropped to four from 10 in 2016. According to the chart, the number of murders in the parish is the lowest since 2013.

While 2017 numbers for most of the eight categories show, at least, a slight decrease over the previous year the number of forcible rapes climbed from 11 cases in 2016 to 31 to 2017. While the 2017 stat shows a 281% increase over the previous year, 31 cases is only one more instance than in the same category over 2015.

The UCR draft released today is included below: