Police Chief Don Bohon presented his annual report to the Ponca City Board of Commissioners Monday at City Hall.
Total calls for service — including police response, emergency medical services and Fire Department calls, and other calls for service, was 25,114 for the year. Calls for EMS and fire accounted for 4,860 of those calls.
Total arrests were down by just over a hundred. Ponca City police made 2,234 arrests last year, slotting right between the 2,347 arrests made in 2015 and 2,156 arrests in 2014.
The number of juvenile cases saw a significant rise in the wake of a downward trend that saw 306 juvenile cases in 2011 fall to 168 cases in 2015. Last year police handled 465 juvenile cases. Bohon attributed the jump to increased enforcement of juvenile offenses such as curfew violations and minors in possession of tobacco or alcohol.
Written traffic citations totaled 8,676, split into 3,586 violations and 5,090 written warnings. Traffic collisions were down from 724 in 2015 to 690 last year.
“It is our philosophy that traffic enforcement plays a major role in crime enforcement,” Bohon said. “It is not a matter of writing tickets and generating revenue – there is no possible way our department could be even partially funded through fines. Instead, it’s demonstrating to the community that there is an active police presence.”
Bohon noted that the City’s 55 sworn officers and its 51 police vehicles logged a total of 451,071 miles driven last year.
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