Keep what works. Fix what's moving the wrong way.

What's happening

The trend is good, and that should be said out loud.

Violent crime in Rockford fell 16.5% in 2025, to 1,359 offenses, the fourth consecutive annual decline. Homicides fell from 18 to 12, the fewest since 2004. Aggravated assaults fell from 1,305 to 1,080.

Bob won't run down Rockford to get elected mayor of it. Violent crime has fallen four years running. Keep what is working — and focus harder on what is getting worse.

There is also the gap between what the numbers say and how the city feels after dark. Lighting, occupied storefronts, events that put people downtown together, and officers who are actually visible all move that second thing, and a mayor controls more of it than the crime rate itself.

The officers and the community programs that produced a four-year decline should keep doing what they're doing.

And the categories going the other way

Auto theft is up 22%. Property crime is what most residents experience, and it doesn't move with the homicide rate. And with homicides down to 12, traffic deaths on Rockford's streets are now in the same range — a comparison drawn from police year-end data and state crash records, and labeled as the campaign's own arithmetic on the sources page.

52.1% of violent incidents in this city are domestic-violence related. The largest single share of the violence here happens between people who know each other, often inside a house, and the city's resources should reflect that.

That figure is a program area, and it's funded well below the share of the problem it represents.

What I'd do

Continuity first, then the specific gaps.

1. Keep the strategies producing the decline, and say so in the first budget. Reversing a working approach to look decisive is how a four-year trend ends.
2. Treat domestic violence as the largest single category it is. Co-responder capacity, a dedicated follow-up unit, and coordination with the advocacy organizations already doing this work — funded against the share of the workload it represents rather than the share of the headlines.
3. A property crime and auto theft response that measures clearance and recovery, publishes both monthly, and doesn't quietly stop counting when the numbers improve.
4. Traffic deaths belong in the public safety column. The intersections and corridors producing the fatalities are known. Engineering fixes on the worst of them, sequenced with the paving program.
5. Juvenile intervention with named partners and measured outcomes, reported publicly rather than described in a press release.
6. Visible policing, and officers connected to the blocks they serve. Residents and business owners should know the officers working their neighborhood, and there should be a visible presence where crime — and the fear of it — is keeping people away. Community engagement and visible policing are not opposites; the first is what makes the second welcome.
7. Recruitment and retention. The staffing plan gets published with the budget every year: authorized strength, actual strength, attrition.

And the three street-level problems stay three problems. Homelessness, soliciting in the roadways and public disorder get argued about as one thing, and a city that runs them together ends up policing poverty and fixing nothing. Each gets its own answer: publish the count, end the roadway permit for every group, and put a clinician on the shift and somewhere to take people at 2 a.m. The co-responder capacity is the same capacity the domestic violence response above is built on, which is why it appears once in the budget rather than twice.

On automated license plate readers: turn them off, and don’t renew the contract. The full position, in writing — including what happens to the data the city already holds.