HUNTINGTON — Violent and property crimes in the city of Huntington continue to decline as the city moves further from 2017, the most violent year seen in recent history.
City police officials believe new strategies employed in the past few years contributed to that drop, and they are implementing initiatives that they believe will continue to quell the number of crimes.
With violent crime down 28% since 2017 and property crime down 33% since 2016, in a joint meeting with Capt. Dan Underwood and current City Manager Hank Dial, Interim Huntington Police Chief Ray Cornwell said he believes the city is safe.
“Obviously we would like to continue to see the numbers go down,” he said. “But we believe Huntington is a safe city. Some people may perceive it as unsafe because of a few incidents that are outlying or random, and we would like to continue to combat that perception and reinforce the idea that this is a safe community.”
Local community group leaders last week praised the police response to the city’s violent 2017, stating they had seen a decline in crime. But they also said they felt the city could do more to deter lower-level crimes.
Most numbers decline in 2019 from 2018Huntington police responded to 7,541 calls in 2019. Of those responses, 2,105 reports stemmed from property crimes and 308 were for violent crimes.
Violent crime in Huntington dropped nearly 12% in 2019, down from 349 reports in 2018 to 308 last year. Huntington saw 426 violent crime reports in 2017 and 370 in 2016.
The number of homicides dropped from 10 in 2018 to seven in 2019. Forcible rape declined from 87 in 2018 to 78 in 2019, and robbery deceased more than 34%, from 101 to 66 last year.
Aggravated assault increased from 151 in 2018 to 157 last year, but Cornwell said he did not find the increase to be significant.
While former police chief Dial said over the summer that he had concerns about higher property crime numbers in the first half of the year, property crime deceased nearly 9% in total in 2019, dropping from 2,311 reported crimes in 2018 to 2,105 last year. Huntington had 2,601 property crime reports in 2017 and 2,176 in 2016.
Burglary dropped from 550 in 2018 to 466 in 2019, and larceny dropped from 1,533 to 1,392. However, arson increased from 18 to 25 last year, and motor vehicle theft went from 210 to 222.
Larger picture shows continuing drop in numbers overall
These Part I Crimes are reported to the FBI yearly by each department. It includes two categories — violent and property crimes — broken into four crimes each. Violent crime includes aggravated assault, forcible rape, homicide and robbery. Property crimes include arson, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft.
The seven homicides reported in 2019 is the least since six were reported in 2014. Robberies have also dropped 55% since 2016.
The decline in rates of homicide and robbery marks a shift from drug-related crime to more random events, Cornwell said.
While the numbers continue to drop, eradicating the city of violent crimes, especially homicides, completely is a difficult task, Cornwell said, but the city is on the path to at least reduce them.
“Obviously that’s a hard thing to prevent and predict. You can’t really have a crystal ball to foresee who is going to kill somebody,” he said. “But we can, and we have been trying to, start some initiatives that target violent offenders who are likely to become trigger pullers.”
While arson cases rose by nearly 39% last year, 15 of the 25 events occurred in the first half of the year, many of them caused by people living in vacant structures searching for warmth.
Rape reports are up 32% from 2017 to 2019, but Cornwell said much of that could be attributed to the #MeToo movement started by women in Hollywood to encourage sexual assault victims to talk about their attacks. It’s not necessarily increasing because more attacks are happening, he said.
Cornwell said the decrease in both property and violent crimes could be attributed to several things, including the Violent Crime Initiative and better patrols of vacant housing.
Community members respond
Neighborhood Institute president Donna Rumbaugh, a West Huntington resident and business owner, said she had been seeing a continuous gradual decline in crime, especially violent ones, in the past few years. The institute represents 16 neighborhood associations in Huntington.
“I’m usually robbed every year of my equipment and haven’t had that in quite some time now,” she said.
Although hesitant to speak for the neighborhood associations, Rumbaugh said she has received “spotty” feedback from those groups about crime in their area. She said she still believes overall crime is falling. Her daughter lives downtown, she said, and she doesn’t believe she has experienced severe crime.
“I think the police are taking care of a lot of the drug problems and every time they hit a place, the crime rate goes down even further,” she said. “It seems like a long-term effort by everybody.”
Stephanie Heck, the leader of the West End Neighborhood Watch Huntington, WV group on Facebook, which has more than 2,250 members, said she believes the numbers have decreased dramatically in the West End over the past two years, and attributed much of that to the leadership of Dial.
“While West Huntington still has problems with low-level street crime, we have nowhere near the level of felony violent crime that has recently been seen in East Huntington,” she said. “There are still crime hotspots in the West End, but far less violence than there was in the past.”
She said the biggest issues she sees in the West End now have to do with shoplifters, vagrants and prostitutes. Heck added she had requested city officials do lighting upgrades on Madison Avenue, and was told by Jim Insco, the city Public Works director, that the suggestion was approved and submitted to AEP for upgrades from West 5th to 14th Street.
Violent Crime Initiative and vacant housing patrols helping
The Violent Crime Initiative, an idea formed by Detective Shane Bills, was first introduced in December 2017 in response to a record-setting number of violent crime and homicides occurring in Huntington. It formed a group from various bureaus assigned to focus on offenders known for violence or their involvement in the drug trade. The offenders are targeted for rapid investigation to get them off the street quicker before their violence can escalate.
While police can focus on this group of criminals because the chance they will be involved in violence is easy to spot, it’s the randomness of the other crimes that makes a continuous decrease in the crime stats difficult, Bills said.
“It’s more of a direct personal crime, and it’s hard to get ahead of those,” he said. “We are just trying to do what we can to identify the people with the potential for violence and arrest them for other crimes before they can commit violent crimes.”
As far as property crime goes, patrol officers have been working to better patrol abandoned or vacant properties. The department got a list of vacant structures from the city’s Unsafe Buildings Commission and has had more of a presence at the homes, which directly correlates with the decrease in property crimes, he said.
The city of Huntington tore down 102 of those houses last year, which Cornwell said has also helped tremendously.
“They are an attractive nuisance for a criminal population,” he said. “You might look at it as a homeless guy just trying to get into a home to get warm is more of a nuisance crime, but that draws us away from other things we are trying to prevent. We still have to respond to those calls.”
Fewer abandoned houses brings fewer outlets for crime and places to hide, he said.
New contract helps HPD return to community policing as future of department unclear
Cornwell has been holding down the fort for the department since December, when it was announced that Dial would become Huntington’s city manager. Dial’s permanent replacement has not yet been selected and Mayor Steve Williams can take up to six months to make his decision.
So it’s too soon to say whether a new chief will bring new approaches to the department. However, a new contract reached with officers last year already has brought changes for the department.
On Jan. 4, HPD switched the officers to a 12-hour workday and broke down shift coverage districts from six to eight smaller coverage zones.
Cornwell said the change allows the department to get back closer to the traditional “beat cop” idea of policing, in which three or four officers will be assigned to cover the same zone throughout the week. This allows them to grow a closer community bond, as well as gain knowledge of what might be unusual behavior in the area and help officers stay on top of cases reported to them.
“It gives them some ownership and gets them invested more back to the idea of the beat cop — the guy who knows his neighborhood, his community and his zone,” he said. “It gives them more ownership and more investment if they have to come back to the same neighborhood and same area.”
Cornwell said working closely with the community and the department’s federal and local partners is what will help make the numbers continue to decline.
Another positive for the new contract is a 12% pay raise over a three-year period. Cornwell said he hopes this helps attract new officers who want to help in making Huntington safer. The department has several openings.


