Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Public Safety topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Lancaster commission hears ComStat, CHP and LPD updates as part-I crimes fall overall
Summary
Deputy Kit Grupey and CHP PIO Jordan Church presented August ComStat and CHP enforcement updates: city homicides at 12, Part I crime totals down overall, and CHP reported a focused enforcement operation that yielded more than 100 citations over three days. LPD highlighted ShotSpotter drops and LPR results from the fair.
The Lancaster Criminal Justice Commission on an August 2025 agenda received crime and traffic-enforcement updates from county and state law enforcement officials that showed mixed trends across offenses and a stepped-up focus on high-crash corridors.
Deputy Kit Grupey, Lancaster Sheriff Station community-relations public information officer, told the commission the city had 12 homicides so far in 2025 and the unincorporated area had six, for a combined total of 18. "We are at 12," Grupey said while reviewing the ComStat figures. He reported the city's Part I crime total at 2,752 and the countywide total at 3,198, representing an overall decline in Part I crimes compared with the same time last year.
Grupey also reported August traffic figures for Lancaster: zero fatal crashes, 65 injury crashes, 74 non-injury crashes, 288 citations issued and 38 DUI arrests.
Jordan Church, public information officer for the California Highway Patrol in the Antelope Valley, said enforcement and arrest metrics have been temporarily affected by the number of trainees in field training, but the agency expects patrol activity to increase as trainees complete that phase. Church described a targeted enforcement operation on Avenue N and State Route 138 that, over three days, "resulted in over 100 citations being issued" and included a felony-warrant arrest.
Church said distracted-driving citations were among the violations that rose during the recent quarter and that CHP would provide corridor crash statistics at a future meeting if the commission requested them.
Lancaster Police Department staff told the commission the department participated in the citywide "Love Your City" cleanup (removing more than 40 tons of trash), completed access to statewide CLES systems for officers, and added two new officers and additional motors. LPD reported that ShotSpotter deployment coincided with a reduction in reported gunshot events (citing a decline from 55 events in October 2024 to about 20 in recent months) and that license-plate-reader data at the county fair showed roughly 35,000 cars during the fair, about 24,000 of them unique, and nine stolen vehicles detected during that period.
The commission approved the consent calendar minutes without objection and received commitments from CHP and LPD to provide additional crash- and enforcement-data breakdowns at a future meeting.
The commission's next steps included asking staff to provide follow-up statistics and targeted reports to help refine enforcement and code-enforcement priorities.
