During brief comments to the city council, McCleary Police Chief Steven Blumer encouraged the public to not be bashful when it comes to reporting crimes.

Blumer was delivering a report to the council about recent criminal activity in McCleary.

“I know it’s been raining a lot, but it is getting warmer and the days are lasting a lot longer,” Blumer said. “We’ve been seeing a lot more vehicle prowls, and more people in the area who aren’t from McCleary. There are more thefts.”

He cautioned the council against reading too far into the numbers on the report he provided. Law enforcement agencies countywide recently switched to a new reporting system. The new reports generated do not appropriately differentiate between crimes, Blumer said.

Case in point, the report Blumer provided to the council on April 26 showed four vehicles thefts, however four vehicles had not been stolen in McCleary.

“Two are recovered vehicles. Two were stolen, not in the city of McCleary but it falls under our reports and pops up under McCleary’s code and falls in our system — they were stolen in Aberdeen and Hoquiam and recovered here,” Blumer said. “It’s a learning process for them in coding and getting things right. So how this report comes out, is it 100 percent accurate? It will get better when they learn how to do reports.”

An additional and more important point Blumer wanted to get across to the city and its residents was the need for participation and communication between residents and the local police department.

Local officers recently have been responding to crimes only to learn there were past crimes never reported due to the lack of severity.

“When I go to their house they say, ‘Sorry for calling you… I only got this planter stolen… it’s not a big deal,’” Blumer said. “It is a big deal because if we don’t know where items are getting stolen in the city, I can’t have my officers focusing on that area. Criminals do target certain areas, and they will stay in that area if it’s profitable for them. So we don’t know that it’s happening if only one person is reporting it and 10 people are actually having things stolen. We won’t know to target those areas.”