By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
Last week, Northfield Police Chief Jeff Schroepfer gave the department’s annual report on crimes, traffic stops, and noteworthy events in the city. Overall, the department saw a 6% decrease in the number of calls from 2023 to 2024. In 2024, the department had 27,987 calls. Medicals were the leading type of call, accounting for 4.6% of the calls.
Unlike regular calls, the number of traffic stops in 2024 increased by 5%, to 4,482. In the last five years, there has been an increase of 63.5%. Schroepher stated this has been a growing trend across the state and country since COVID:
“Even with my short time here coming from a traffic agency, as COVID happened and as things started coming back, we got more and more aggressive drivers, more and more speeders, more texting, that kind of thing. The increase of traffic stops goes right along with that, that trend line coming back up.” – Northfield Police Chief Jeff Schroepfer at the 3/4/2025 City Council Meeting
43% of traffic citations were for speeding, 20% were for issues with insurance, also 20% were for driving without or with an expired licence, and 10% for no registration. The number of car accidents in Northfield is also up:
“This is not just a Northfield. This is a statewide trend that accidents are up. Fatal crashes have been up in the state the last couple years. Some pretty alarming rates on that, so part of combating that is with the traffic stop. So hopefully bring those back down again.” – Northfield Police Chief Jeff Schroepfer at the 3/4/2025 City Council Meeting
The number of crimes is overall down, with a 1.6% decrease from 2023 to 2024 and a 15% decrease from 2020, meaning that there were 900 crimes in Northfield in 2024. Theft accounted for 30% of crime events, all other offenses was 11%, assault was 11%, Driving While Intoxicated was 11%, and fraud was 8%.
The report also detailed information about the department’s staffing, Schroepher stated that the department’s goal is to have 26 staff members:
“Goal staff is 26 officers. It seems like we get there and then we drop again. You can see the trend line here. Kind of bounces all around. We’ve been there. What? Twice in the last two years, basically. So it’s just we never can seem to stay there.” – Northfield Police Chief Jeff Schroepfer at the 3/4/2025 City Council Meeting
Currently, the Police Chief stated that the department is two officers short of its goal, and that the jobs have already been posted.
When asked his opinions on the direction the city, Schroepher expressed optimism:
“I’m very optimistic where I knew staffing was going to be difficult, staffing for law enforcement is challenging across the entire nation. So how do we compete with? And then you compete with the call load. It’s very promising to to look at like the stats and know that, hey, we’re doing more with less. Which is kind of that expectation, but it’s good to see as well as like my thing coming in as somebody new from the outside. Are we doing the best we can with the amount of time that we have?” – Northfield Police Chief Jeff Schroepfer at the 3/4/2025 City Council Meeting
View the full report here.
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