Lee Jones called police when he saw three men loading a truck with county-owned steel, hoping he finally had a lead on the thieves who’d ransacked his nearby barn several times.

“I followed them into town, and the deputies finally got them stopped, but they never did admit to the thefts at my place,” Jones said of his farm in Lincoln. “They’ve hit me six or seven times in the last few years. First, they stripped all the copper wiring out of the barn, then they grabbed all the stainless steel and other welding supplies I was storing in there.”

Farmers in rural Washington County have been losing the gates to their pastures. The Rogers Police Department has reports of residents waking up to find their lawn furniture gone. Utility crews have called from across Benton County to say lines were cut off power and telephone poles. Air conditioners have gone missing in Fayetteville and Springdale.

All of them were stolen. And all were made of metal.

Theft is by far the most common crime reported to area police, and with prices up for copper, aluminum and steel, the most popular target is metal. It’s just one of several crime trends catching the attention of Northwest Arkansas authorities.

Lt. Derek Hudson, spokesman for the Springdale Police Department, said investigators learn to combat each problem as it arises.

“We’ve done a lot of things to cut down on copper theft,” he said. “We’ve been working with the prosecutor’s office so when you go in and sell it, there’s a checks and balances system in place.”

Robbery Rash?

Northwest Arkansas appeared to have a serious problem over the last several years with bank robbers, according to the statistics. Among officers, however, that spike is known as the “Barnes statistic.”

“We don’t have a problem with bank robberies. We had one guy who had a serious problem with robbing banks,” said Capt. Dallas McClellan of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. “Now that we’ve got him stopped, those numbers should drop accordingly.”

The holdup man in question, Michael Anthony Barnes, was convicted of 10 bank robberies between 2007 and 2012, including several he pulled while awaiting trial after his first arrest. Barnes slipped out of his court-ordered ankle monitor and robbed several additional banks.

Another robber hit two Fayetteville banks, walking away empty-handed from one, before trying his luck at a gold-buying store. Nathan Chism brandished a knife at the gold-store clerk, who shot and wounded him. Chism eventually pleaded guilty to all three robberies.

Drug Trends Evolve

The drug scene has seen several shifts in recent years, said Sgt. Brad Renfro of the 4th Judicial District Drug Task Force. Meth labs continue to decline, down 60 percent in 2012, as more of the drug is imported from larger labs in Mexico and the southwest United States. Newer methods of producing small amounts of meth — a system known as one-pot or shake-and-bake — have replaced most local, full-size labs, he said.

Marijuana, on the other hand, isn’t coming in bulk from Mexico or South America anymore. Most of the pot seized now tends to be high-grade strains coming in from Colorado, California and other states where production has been legalized, Renfro said.

“It’s definitely a new direction, a different supply chain and a different product,” he said. “It doesn’t appear to be linked back to the traditional routes or the big drug cartels.”

It’s also more expensive, meaning a bigger payoff in cash or drugs when someone robs a drug dealer.

“It’s been a factor in a lot of the home-invasion cases we’ve seen, including one in Fayetteville that escalated to gunfire and left one of the robbers dead,” said John Threet, 4th District prosecuting attorney. “It’s so lucrative, people are taking the risk of robbing dealers.”

Drug habits fuel other crimes, and Jones blames drugs for the recurring thefts from his barn.

“I know they’re selling it to get their next drug fix,” he said. “It wasn’t a problem until the price of metal got so high, but in every case I’ve heard about, drugs are the reason they’re looking for quick money. There’s no more metal in that barn, but I just hope they don’t decide to come back and start stealing my hay.”

Abuse of prescription drugs is the major driver in one particular type of robbery: area pharmacies. More than 20 area pharmacies have been targeted in the last four years.

“They’re after painkillers, OxyContin, that type of thing,” said Keith Foster, public information officer for the Rogers Police Department. “I can’t recall the last time anyone robbed a pharmacy for cash.”

Digital Crimefighting

Computer child pornography is something local departments deal with on a routine basis, said Sgt. Craig Stout of the Fayetteville Police Department. While the invention of the Internet makes it easier for people to access child pornography, Stout said, it also makes it easier for officers to catch child predators.

In the past, Stout said officers had to find actual hard copies of a photo to arrest someone for child pornography.

“Computers are a tool,” he said. “Images never go away.”

Officers said identity fraud, theft and even harassment can include online components. Fayetteville police arrested one man earlier this year for terroristic threatening based on posts to his Facebook account.

Fraudulent use of a credit card is also up, Stout said. He said people will use stolen credit cards to make a few quick purchases. More crime includes computers or other technology than ever before, even if the crime itself isn’t technological, police said.

Springdale police used computer addresses, phone numbers and email addresses in 2012 to track down a gang of robbers who were luring victims to meet by posting for-sale or personal ads on craigslist.

New laws have created online databases to track serial numbers and other characteristics of pawned items and scrap metal that can aid police in tracing the sellers for investigation.

“We’ve had folks for a long time who specialized in forensic evidence recovery, looking for files on computers and histories on phones,” Hudson said. “Now, they’re trained to use all sorts of databases.”

One of those databases, LeadsOnLine, offers police a place to share information on cold cases, ongoing investigations and patterns in crime. The state and federal crime information databases can provide officers at a traffic stop with a driver’s criminal background and any outstanding warrants as well as traffic history and insurance information.

Other technological advances have also affected certain types of crime. Check scanners and online banking have reduced the number of hot check cases to less than 25 percent of what they were a decade ago, Threet estimates. Gasoline pumps with credit card scanners, along with gasoline station requirements to pay for gasoline before pumping, have greatly reduced gasoline theft, or “gas driveoffs.”

Number Jumble

Law enforcement authorities said the crime figures available don’t paint an accurate or comparable picture. While some agencies submit year-end crime data to the FBI, it’s not mandatory. Not all agencies collect their statistics in the same way, which makes it difficult to compare cities. Other statistics are simply misleading.

A double-homicide early this year shows up in 2012 statistics as a huge jump in crime for one small town.

“It may be the murder capital of Northwest Arkansas right now,” said Gary Ricker, police chief in Greenland. The town didn’t have a murder in 2011 so the 2012 homicide rate was a 200 percent increase.

“Trains kill as many people around here as people do,” Ricker said.

That sort of crime rate bias creeps into most of the available crime statistics, said Greg Tabor, Fayetteville police chief.

“When we submit our crime numbers to the FBI, they give us a population number,” he said. “It’s based on projections each year after the 2010 Census.”

For instance, prior to 2010, the projected population was about 79,000. The real census number was actually about 74,000.

“They kept increasing our number based on their projection,” Tabor said. “We did have an increase in crime that year, but even if the number of the crimes were the same, the rate would go up because of the population decrease. The bottom line number of crimes is the important thing to look at.”