Well, the good news is Traverse City is safer.

The Ticker connected with both Traverse City Police Department (TCPD) Chief Jeff O’Brien and Grand Traverse County Sheriff Tom Bensley, and learned that local law enforcement has changed dramatically in the past four weeks.

“Everything has just kind of slowed down,” Bensley tells The Ticker, explaining that calls for service – the clearest indicator of how busy the department is – have dipped considerably since the start of the pandemic. From March 13 to April 15, the County Sheriff’s Office received 595 calls for service, down more than 60 percent from the same period in 2019. Those calls encompass everything the Sheriff’s Office investigates, from traffic crashes to suspicious situations to assaults.

Vehicular incidents have seen the biggest decreases, something Bensley credits to Michigan’s stay-at-home order and the relatively limited amount of car traffic on county roads. Property damage accidents reported during the March 16 to April 16 window dipped from 150 in 2019 to only 55 in 2020, while injury accidents decreased from 17 last year to 13 this year.

Some types of calls, however, haven’t seen the same dips. From mid-March to mid-April this year, the Sheriff’s Office dealt with 44 assault cases, compared to 46 for the same time window last year. And several categories actually saw increases from 2019, including suicide attempts (six in 2020, up from just two in 2019), trespassing (nine in 2020, up from four in 2019), and retail fraud (which doubled from 16 calls in 2019 to 32 this year).

The TCPD is mostly dealing with different issues, from disorderly conduct to destruction of property. Speaking with Northern Express – sister publication of The Ticker – TCPD Chief Jeff O’Brien said that, from March 13 to April 13, 270 of his department’s service calls were just officers conducting property inspections downtown. Several downtown businesses have been vandalized since the start of the pandemic, putting TCPD on guard for similar incidents. “We’re just getting out of the cars and looking at businesses and making sure they’re not B&E’d,” O’Brien explained.

TCPD is also working to provide resources and support for vulnerable populations – such as the homeless or those seeking substance abuse help – given the unique challenges that COVID-19 has presented for local organizations like Safe Harbor and Addiction Treatment Services.

Many of the calls the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Office has received lately have concerned things that, until very recently, wouldn’t have merited calls at all. Since March 23, when Governor Whitmer issued her stay-at-home order and mandated that non-essential businesses close, Bensley says his department has gotten roughly 60 complaints about businesses that were potentially violating the order. Given that what constitutes an “essential” business or operation might vary depending on the eye of the beholder, the Sheriff’s Office is deferring to County Prosecutor Noelle Moeggenberg to make the final determinations in those cases.

“We want to make sure there is uniformity and consistency [on essential business determinations], and that's why one person is making the decision,” Bensley says.

So far, Bensley says that neither his department nor the prosecutor’s office have needed to issue any citations for businesses violating the stay-at-home order. Several have been asked to cease their operations, but none have violated the order after this initial warning.

Other executive orders aren’t quite so easy for local police to enforce. On April 10, Governor Whitmer extended her initial order and added a provision banning travel between residences for Michigan residents with more than one home in the state. While Bensley understands the reasoning behind the order – which is ostensibly to keep popular “vacation home” areas like northern Michigan isolated from downstate COVID-19 hotspots – he also notes that there isn’t a clear way of tracking those movements or enforcing the policy.

“Somebody would have to call us to let us know [a violation is happening], like a neighbor or someone like that,” Bensley says. “We don't have a list of who has vacation homes up here, to go check and see if somebody was there.”

For the most part, with the vacation home issue and other executive orders – such as the $1,000 fine for individuals caught violating social distancing rules, or the ban against most short-term rental operations – both the County Sheriff’s Office and TCPD are focusing on warnings rather than citations.

“In a nutshell, I think we’re asking for compliance,” Bensley says. “In the case of the social distancing requirement, if we saw someone violating that, it would be a kind of like getting stopped for speeding. The officer would give you a warning, not necessarily a ticket. I think, a lot of times, there needs to be some education involved. So, right now, we’re just letting people know exactly what the orders are. To my knowledge, we haven't issued any tickets or citations [for executive order violations], and I hope we don't have to.”