SCRANTON, Pa. — A Washington D.C.-based research firm hired by Scranton to study the community’s health and safety found worries surrounding public safety remain ever present, even though an analysis of city police data reported crime generally declined over the last few years.
The 115-page report authored by Muflehun will be introduced to the public at Tuesday night’s meeting of Scranton City Council.
City Council President Gerald Smurl said Police Chief Thomas Carroll and a representative from Muflehun will meet with council during an open caucus Sept. 17 to discuss the report.
After reading the report, Smurl said Tuesday he believes the most pressing matter to address is school outreach to keep children from associating with criminal gangs.
Addressing gang violence was among the city’s motivations for awarding Muflehun a $70,000 contract last year.
Smurl said the seemingly common perception is that crime in Scranton “seems at its worst.” He can understand why.
A spate of high-profile violence — some of it reportedly gang-related — is a “huge hit” to the city, he said. Five homicides within the first five months of this year roughly doubled the city’s typical 12-month murder rate.
“It almost looks like it’s out of control,” Smurl said.
However, Muflehun examined five years of calls-for-service data from the Scranton police and found that reports of crime have been dropping in almost every category.
“The promising trend of decreased calls for service for most types of incidents, coupled with an increase in proactive, officer-initiated efforts is an indicator of a strong public safety sector in the City of Scranton,” the research firm wrote in its report.
That largely tracks with trends found in the Uniform Crime Reporting data that the city submits to the Pennsylvania State Police.
According to the UCR data, incidents of robbery, felony assault, burglary, theft and arson all decreased between 2018 and 2023. Rapes and misdemeanor assaults were up but still below the highs reported during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, mental health related calls have not decreased as much, Muflehun found.
In fact, the agency found that calls to the police for suicides and attempted suicides rose by more than 50% between 2018 and 2023.
“The Scranton Police Department cannot be expected to address this issue alone,” Muflehun wrote in its report.
The Scranton community has insufficient access to mental health services, community non-profit executives told Muflehun.
Providers can’t keep up with demand due to lack of funding and affordability. The schools do not pay due attention to the mental health needs of schoolchildren. The issue is most unrecognized among children from immigrant and refugee communities.
Some other takeaways from interviews Muflehun conducted with community organizations:
• The lack of affordable housing is among the top issues facing the city. Landlords are reluctant to do business with low-income tenants, rental houses are frequently dilapidated and developers are uninterested in marketing affordable units.
• No one coordinates the services of providers offering food to low-income populations. As a result, some providers are overburdened while others are underutilized.
• Public transportation does not adequately link Scranton residents to services they might need. Children who need after school programs the most might not have access due to a lack of transportation.
• The report alleges that the quality of the area’s public school system has deteriorated. “Schools need to improve in fulfilling the responsibilities of providing services other than basic education,” the report states.
• Employers struggle to pay competitive salaries, so young professionals look elsewhere for work. For those reentering society from prison or jail, existing job training programs are inadequate.
• The city’s homeless population, which seems to have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, does not have sufficient access to overnight shelters. The number of unsheltered individuals in Scranton reached a high of 49 earlier this year, according to the United Neighborhood Centers of Northeastern Pennsylvania, but officials there say that may be attributable to better outreach from those conducting this year’s census.
