EDIE ZUVANICH Special to the Press
HUTTO — For a fastgrowing city of 40,000 people, Hutto has experienced a relatively low crime rate. But 2023 saw a concerning jump in many areas, especially related to theft, burglary and robbery.
“We’re doing some good stuff. We’re not perfect,” Police Chief Jeffrey Yarbrough told council members at a Jan. 18 meeting. “The bad news is we’ve still got work to do. The good news is we get to do it.”
While only 18 home burglaries were reported in 2023, that is still double the number from the previous year. Non-residential building burglaries almost tripled, going from 16 to 45 in the space of one year. Vehicle burglaries jumped from 36 in 2022 to 94 last year. And cases of reported theft increased from 176 to 269.
Officers have been struggling to keep up with the demands of a growing population. As of Dec. 31, 2023, the department had 20 patrol officers and had filed 3,626 incident reports for the year. In 2022, the department ended the year with 26 patrol officers and 2,195 incident reports. That represents a 65% increase in cases with fewer officers.
“Over the past two to three years we have been well below minimum staffing when it comes to shifts and when it comes to the number of officers. We had a lot of retention issues where we weren’t able to keep officers and we weren’t able to hire,” the chief said.
In 2023, the city increased the budget for police salaries to give Hutto a better tool for recruitment and raised the number of sworn officers in the department to 51 when fully staffed. Yarbrough said the increase immediately started attracting experienced officers to the city.
“We’re getting officers from around the area that are bring in added value and a sigh of welcome relief from the officers that have been carrying the load,” he said.
Until the new officers are activated, Yarbrough said the department is still sometimes shortstaffed.
“There are times when you have minimum staffing. That’s when you have four officers on duty,” the chief said. “That’s a problem because they’re going from call to call to call to call to call and there are times we haven’t had the luxury to go out and work traffic violations or moving violations.”
Hutto police responded to 434 traffic crashes in 2023. Major accidents can tie up officers at the site for long periods of time, leaving fewer officers available to answer other calls.
Yarbrough said the department is finally at a place where, with the new staff coming on board, they will be able to create a dedicated traffic unit to respond to accidents in addition to fully staffing shifts with six officers for calls.
Besides traffic issues, the chief reported the main areas of concern he hears from residents are the increase in car burglaries and slow police response times.
“I don’t recall a single car burglary in our community over the past year where a window was broken,” he said, pointing out that most car burglaries can be prevented by locking doors and not leaving valuables in the car.
Officers have been making extra neighborhood patrols late at night to discourage auto burglary, and Yarbrough said residents reporting suspicious activity have led to arrests of people stealing from cars.
Additional patrols, once activated, are expected to help decrease police response times. Patrols are planned to be located in different sectors of town, decreasing the travel distance and the possibility of delays due to railroad crossings.
However, the number of officers is not the only factor involved in response time. Calls to the department are routed through a Williamson County dispatch call center. Yarbrough said calls are responded to in order of priority and during peak times calls end up in a queue, increasing the amount of time between when a resident makes the call and when Hutto PD receives it.
During the Jan. 18 meeting, the council approved an additional two patrol officer staff positions for the department. The new positions are being funded by savings from other line items in the budget.
