At Monday’s council meeting, Mayor Butch Berry acknowledged Thomas Achord for his 16 years of service as a patrol officer and four years as Police Chief in the town he grew up in, and then asked him to respond to reports about crime statistics that made Eureka Springs seem like a scary place.
Achord explained that statistics gathered by national databases showed that Eureka Springs had three murders recently. He said there has not been a murder in Eureka Springs in more than 15 years, although there have been three murders in Carroll County within nearby zip codes, and some crime statistics websites place those events in Eureka Springs.
He said these kinds of statistics are unavoidable, but Eureka Springs is an anomaly with respect to numbers anyway. Most towns of barely more than 2000 have three or four officers. However, Eureka Springs might have 10,000 or more visitors show up on certain weekends and a total of 1.2 million visitors annually, which adds to the crime statistics and require a larger police force. Achord said his 12 officers were maxed out on a recent weekend with all the events going on in town, and statistics get skewed.
Achord said he thinks of Eureka Springs as Mayberry where it is safe to walk your dog at night. Nevertheless, there are incidents involving methamphetamines and heroin, and his officers try to follow leads to the higher-up perpetrators. He said he encounters the usual traffic stops and such, but no serious incidents. He also said juvenile crime has been plummeting for years.