Statistics for the first five months of 2020 indi-cated that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Fountain Hills patrol district is on pace for a 25 percent in-crease in traffic violations for 2020.

MCSO Capt. Larry Kratzer provided the Town Council with an up-date in June. Between January and the end of May deputies had ad-dressed 1,074 traffic vio-lations, according to Kratzer’s report. That ex-trapolates to an estimated 2,577 for the whole year, compared to 2,064 for 2019.

A big part of those traf-fic violations are for speeding, according to the update. MCSO estimates 1,760 speeding violations for the whole year, com-pared to 1,423 during 2019.

Stop sign and red light violations spiked in 2019 at 252 and are estimated to drop to around 120 for this calendar year.

With the increase in traffic enforcement, vehi-cle crashes appear to be headed down for this year. Non-injury incidents are projected to be down just slightly (120 from 127), and injury incidents are estimated to be 24, compared to 42 last year.

Crimes against persons are largely showing a downward trend with the exception of assault. There were 42 assaults during the first five months of 2020 projecting out to 101 for the year. That is up about 10 per-cent from 2019 (88).

Identity theft continues to show some decline over previous years as the pub-lic receives more infor-mation about potential scams.

Property crime statis-tics indicate those inci-dents will remain very similar to the past couple of years.

Kratzer also reported that the top 10 calls for service continue to re-main consistent year to year.

Welfare checks lead the way followed by false burglar alarms, citi-zen/motorist assist, suspi-cious activity, audible burglar alarm, suspicious person, follow-up, loud neighbors, traffic hazard and non-injury vehicle crashes.