WILDWOOD — According to city officials, police responded to 3,200 calls during the month of January 2012.

That information was made available during the Board of Commissioners Feb. 10 meeting.
Unlike municipalities like Middle and Lower townships, North Wildwood and Ocean City, the city does not provide the media with monthly incident reports.

“On my street alone, across from me was just robbed, two streets over from me was robbed on New Year’s Day,” said Sandra Richardson. “I have a dog in my house, but I’ve been hearing that they are stealing the pets. This is scary to me. We need help. There are just too many robberies here. What are we doing about it?”

Mayor Ernie Troiano assured Richardson that police were doing things behind the scenes to solve the problem.

“There are certain elements in your community, that, when the certain elements come into the community, and all of a sudden there are robberies, then you know that the element had something to do with it. I can tell you the police department is very aware of the situation,” said Troiano.

Richardson asked commissioners to bring in the county to assist.

“I can’t walk down my street without my keys and my phone, all kinds of people lurking. I’ve been watching the neighborhood all these weeks. I can do so much. I’m not a babysitter,” said Richardson. “We need to get the landlords responsible for all the crime coming out of these houses who are jacking up what we have to spend on our police force.”

“The bottom line is a simple solution,” said Troiano. “Some of our landlords, if they were not so quick to rent to this element, we wouldn’t have these issues.” The mayor assured Richardson the city was doing all that it could to enact ordinances to help curb rentals to rowdy renters.
“There are so many rowdies that it’s time we called in the county or something,” said Richardson.

The mayor responded that the city continues to have cooperation with the county Prosecutor’s Office as well with Sheriff’s Department.

“We’re limited to the number of officers we have,” said Troiano. The city’s police department is comprised of 30 officers – one chief, one captain, one lieutenant, five sergeants, three corporals and 19 patrolmen.

“We had over 3,200 calls just last month,” said Commissioner Tony Leonetti. “Some of them may be domestic, some of them may be a cat up a tree. Thirty two hundred calls that we had to respond to.”

“It’s true what she (Richardson) said,” said Lorraine Celinski.

Celinski suggested the city revitalize its Town Watch Program.

“I thought that was very effective,” said Cilinski. “We would tell the police what we would see and they would advise us back. I think it would be very helpful to institute that again.”

“We’ll see if we can get somebody to jump on that and start it again,” said Troiano. “It never hurts to have an extra set of eyes.”