LMPD :: Louisville Metro Police Department
IMAGE

LMPD creates new Burglary Intervention Unit

IMAGE
PHOTO

A crime problem in one Louisville neighborhood was so bad that officers had to go to another city to fix the problem. What our cameras caught Wednesday morning proves it's working. And as a result, Lamont Varner has some explaining to do.

"All he had to do was flash and I would have pulled straight over," says Lamont Varner, Burglary Suspect.

Police say they caught Varner red-handed, breaking into a home in Old Louisville Wednesday morning. "Nobody wants their house to get broken into and somebody they don't know coming in and taking something that doesn't belong to them," says Sgt. Donny Burbrink III, with LMPD's 4th Division.

Sgt. Burbrink says the problem with break ins was getting out of control. "This year we have 545."

But things are started to change, and the number of break ins is going down while arrests are up. "And we've caught 8 people inside of houses and this is just in the first month."

Police credit the success to a new unit that was formed after LMPD commanders made a trip to Nashville, Tennessee. "So they went down there and they shadowed Nashville for a few days and saw how they did things and decided when they came back they wanted to implement it."

The unit, made up of 12 officers, 5 in uniform, 5 in plain clothes and 2 detectives was formed last month. "What the uniform officers will do is they'll form a perimeter around an area that my plain clothes guys are going to watch. They're all my proactive people, they're the ones stopping people they're the ones making the arrests."

And police are already seeing results. Just this week, officers arrested Aaron Williams, Justin Homeister, Chasity Spencer and Amber Souder, all in separate cases. "It was both plain clothes officers that observed them doing somethings, detectives gathering leads on 'em and our uniform officers bringing 'em in. Aaron was actually caught by the uniform officers in a house."

And they're also the ones who took Lamont Varner into custody. This week marks one month that the new unit hit the streets.