The Statesboro Police Department made 1,684 arrests in 2024, and logged just 14 use-of-force incidents, indicating that less than 1% of the arrests involved the use of force by officers.

If every use-of-force incident correlates to an arrest, the precise figure would be 0.831%.

That fits well with the six-year average, which except for a spike in use-of-force incidents in 2023, would also have been less than 1%. As it stands, with 10,713 arrests reported in the six full years since 2018, just 120 were reported to have involved the use of force. That’s 1.1%. The numbers are from the 2024 annual report of the Statesboro Police Department, delivered to the mayor and council during a Feb. 18, 2025, workshop meeting by Chief of Police Charles “Mike” Broadhead, who had a slideshow with graphs.

Among other data, the report also included crime statistics showing Statesboro’s rates of violent and property crimes remain at generally low levels, with few if any statistical surprises in 2024.

‘Use of force’

Just as with some of the categories of crimes, it also helps to know how “use of force” is defined by the police.

“In the last year we only had 14 use of force incidents,” Broadhead said. “Now, we would consider an incident a reported use of force incident if an officer had to use an intermediate weapon, like a Taser or baton, pepper spray or something like that, or some of the (unarmed) strikes would count, if they do like an ankle-kick or something, or if someone complains of injury.”

He added, as a casual example, “If an officer takes somebody to the ground and that person gets a bloody nose and says, ‘Oh my gosh!’ we count that as a use of force.”

However, if one person, while resisting arrest during a single encounter with police, had more than one act or type of force used on them, that would still be counted as one incident.

“Now in some instances, particularly for very combative people, we might have to use force on that person several times,” Broadhead explained.  “That would still be one incident but would be separate applications of force.”

The counts of use-of-force incidents for the past six years were 16 incidents in 2019, 17 in 2020, 16 in 2021, and 15 in 2022, but 28 in 2023 before dropping to 14 incidents last year. So, 2023 had the highest number of use-of-force incidents during the period, followed immediately by 2024 with half as many.

“I don’t know why we had a blip in 2023 – it went up a little bit – but year after year we have a process where we have several layers of supervision, review every use of force incident, review body camera video, make sure that it was (in accordance) with policy and with the law,” the police chief said.

Violent crimes

Delivering these annual reports usually in February of the next year, he likes to put the last year’s numbers, especially of crimes reported, in a longer-term context.

“As we’ve talked about every year, I really like to look at data over at least a decade because our numbers are so small generally that year-to-year there can be some fluctuations, and looking at it more longitudinally, I think, gives us a better idea of what’s really happening,” Broadhead told the mayor and council.

Homicide, robbery, aggravated assault/battery and rape are the four categories of violent crimes tracked in the reports.

Four years have now passed since he delivered a report that included Statesboro’s highest number of homicides in recent decades. 2020 was “a tough year with nine homicides” but as he predicted in 2021, that did not become “the new normal.”

From 2012 through 2019, Statesboro had from one to four homicides reported annually, with an average of 2.4 a year. After the nine killings in the city limits 2020, there were three in 2021, three in 2022, four in 2023, and three again last year.

Meanwhile, the number of battery and aggravated assault incidents reported, in the range of 57 to 65 each year from 2017 through 2021, had dropped sharply to 36 in 2022 before picking back up to 61 such crimes in 2023. There were 60 of these crimes reported in Statesboro in 2024.

Decline in robberies

After the number of robberies reported annually in Statesboro peaked with a total of 50 back in 2017, the incidence has declined most years, to 25 robberies in 2021, just 12 in 2022, resurging to 24 robberies in 2023, and 18 in 2024.

“You know, when I first got here in 2017 we were having a lot of home invasion robberies,” Broadhead said. “You can see that we as a community have fought back against that problem. That’s been fairly steadily declining over the last several years.”

Just seven rapes were reported as such to Statesboro police in 2024. Past numbers were 12 rapes in 2019, then 16 in 2020 and 25 in 2021, 14 in 2022 and six in 2023. Although the trend the last few years may sound encouraging, Broadhead expresses doubt about what gets reported and alludes to how rape is defined in Georgia law.

“I just don’t think that number’s very accurate,” he said. “I think the vast majority of rapes of women, which is this particular number, go unreported for a number of reasons.”

Anyone who has been a victim of sexual abuse or assault or has knowledge of any such incident is advised to call 911 or contact The Teal House, Statesboro Regional Sexual Assault and Child Advocacy Center, located at 209 S. College St., Statesboro, GA 30458. The phone number is (912) 489-6060. The 24-Hour Crisis Line is (866) 489-2225.

Property crimes

Because robbery is included with violent crimes, the annual reports track just two categories of property crimes, “thefts,” which includes larceny and shoplifting, and “burglaries.”

Larceny is a catch-all category for non-robbery thefts of personal property. Burglary means unlawfully entering a structure with intent to commit a crime, whether or not anything is taken.

Statesboro police logged 497 thefts and 62 burglaries in 2024. His graph showed a downward but fluctuating trend for thefts from 2014 through 2024, and a slow but steady decline in reported burglaries since 2016.

“You can see we’ve been in a 10-year decline on thefts, which is great news, and the burglary number, I’m happy to see, has continued to decline after a little bump in 2016,” Broadhead said.

Most of Statesboro’s burglaries, he said, are not random break-ins at homes, but incidents such as a roommate going away for Christmas, “and they come back and one of their other roommates’ friends has kicked in the door and stolen their PlayStation.”

Overall, the statistics help put the level of crime occurring here in perspective, Broadhead asserts.

“We feel like we have fairly accurate numbers all the way back to 1991, and our population was less than half of what it is today, but crime has not doubled over that time,” he said. “So if you look at crime, particularly violent crime, as a per capita number, we are in a much better position per capita today than we were all the way back in 1991.”