Charleston police discussed a recent uptick in burglaries and breaking and entering on the city's West Side during a community meeting Thursday evening.
Law enforcement has conducted warrant sweeps on four properties over the past two days in hopes of finding evidence connecting the string of burglaries.
Detective J.A. "Tyke" Hunt, assistant chief of detectives, told community members at the meeting that the detective bureau is working closely with the department's street crimes and drug units to help solve the crimes.
"We all know this is linked together - you steal stuff to feed your drug habit," Hunt said.
The latest warrant was executed Thursday on a house at the corner of Summit and Somerset drives.
"We recovered some drug evidence," Hunt said about the search. "That person was a suspect in some burglaries around the Edgewood area."
Hunt said an officer also made two arrests this week in relation to recent burglaries near the Five Corners area.
The department is linking those arrests to other cases involving counterfeit money.
Maj. Jason Beckett, deputy chief of police, said Thursday that upticks in burglaries often can be attributed to one or two people.
"Often what we find is, it's one or two, or a small group of people committing them. And when we make an arrest, we end up solving multiple burglaries because of it," he said.
The police department also uses a system called Report It, an online citizen property inventory system where people can store item descriptions and serial numbers for their valuables, which law enforcement can use to help locate stolen items that have been sold to pawn shops.
"We can track pawn shop activity and precious metal activity...so if [someone] already put in a serial number and reports it, it makes our job so much easier to go in and identify who pawned it," Hunt said.
Sgt. Paul Perdue, who heads the department's public services division, also announced there now are nine neighborhood watch groups on the West Side, compared to two years ago when there was just one.
Reach Elaina Sauber
at elaina.sauber@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-3051 or follow
@ElainaSauber on Twitter.