WILMINGTON — The Wilmington Police Department handled 1,414 calls with 68 arrests for the month of September.

We saw a fairly consistent month compared to last year.

This month we had no calls for overdose situations. For the entire year, calls involving overdose situations are down — we have had 22 calls year-to-date as compared to 83 this time last year.

For the month, we handled 47 theft calls. Most of these are thefts from inside someone’s car that include items like purses, tools, change, phones, navigation devices, and medication. We have handled a handful of thefts of bicycles.

We encourage our citizens to be sure they lock their cars. On two occasions where thefts were committed from cars, two guns have been stolen.

We have also taken a few reports of lawn equipment being stolen. We have been in these areas where thefts occur more often, using various methods of patrol.

We encourage people to call in suspicious activity because this helps prevent thefts. In September we had 78 calls of suspicious activity/behavior, and we are grateful when people call these calls in to us.

This number is half of what is was a year ago. I would highly encourage our citizens to call in suspicious behavior when they see it.

We have handled 13 domestic situation calls, with three of them leading to arrests. We cleared up eight theft calls with arrest, too.

All the officers have been busy on following up on theft calls as well as other types of fraud. Currently we are working on five sex crimes and one involves a minor.

A big thanks to our community for their support of Officer Pat Black who competed in Clinton County Dancing with the Stars. Our thanks to Officer Black for his contribution to this great event and a big congratulations to him for winning the audience applause award.

We will be participating in the medication take-back day on Oct. 27; more information will be forthcoming on this event.

We would like to thank our community for their show of support at the Farmers Market when officers were there for a community day.

WPD has hosted a few neighborhood watch meetings and I would like to thank the citizens for showing up for their respective community watch group meeting.

This are very positive interactions and help us spread the word on what types of crime we are seeing, and helps us prevent it.

Duane Weyand is Chief of Police of the City of Wilmington.