Sykesville police report low incident counts, investigate illegal dumping and preview new crime-mapping tool

Sykesville's public safety officials told the Town Council on Feb. 9 that overall incident counts remain modest and presented a preview of a new mapping tool intended to visualize incident patterns.

The department reported 374 total events and six incident reports during the Jan. 19–Feb. 1 period. On the specific illegal-dumping incident the chief said detectives had been unable to identify the responsible vehicle but that officers recovered "two oil barrels and a tire." "This was an illegal dumping by an unknown party that dumped some actually, two oil barrels and a tire," the chief said.

Police also showed council members a mock-up of an incident-mapping system developed with in-house IT staff. The chief said the tool will offer heat maps and clustering views to help the department and council see where officers are responding, aggregate trends over time and provide a visual basis for questions about out-of-town assists or repeat locations.

The department noted burglaries were down compared with the prior year while fraud and identity-fraud reports were higher. The chief said overdose reports remained low. Council members discussed aggregation intervals and suggested multi-month or annual roll-ups would be useful when dealing with small absolute numbers at the local level.

The department reported its newest officer, Officer Kowiak, completed training with a 97.3 overall score and will finish firearms qualifications and field training with Corporal Hoppa before being assigned to patrol duties.

The council did not take formal public-safety actions at the meeting; the report was presented for information and to invite oversight and questions from council members.