Correction: The original version of this article misidentified April Coffee’s name and the meeting place of Latonia Uptown. The relevant lines have been corrected. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused. –LINK nky editorial
A community forum between Latonia community residents, business leaders, police and elected officials occurred Monday night at Post 203 of the American Legion, where attendees discussed the importance of community involvement and the reporting of crimes in the face of last month’s headline-grabbing gun violence.
“This is just us trying to kind of come in and everyone get together and talk and bring about about positivity in Latonia,” said Latonia Uptown board president April Coffee, “and what we can do to make a difference and to help out.”
Latonia Uptown is a community organization that organized the event. Members of the city commission, local business leaders and elected members of the Covington Schools Board of Education were all in attendance at the meeting.
Much of the event consisted of questions and answers between the attendees and two members of the Covington Police Department, Captain Joshua Bornhorn and Officer Josh Knott, a community liaison officer.
Bornhorn quickly established the central theme of his talks with the attendees: The perception of crime, specifically in Latonia, often doesn’t reflect the reality of crime.
“It’s not like in the movies where people drive around, and they just like start shooting the place up,” Bornhorn said. “There’s not bands of criminals running around looking to murder people.”
Large amounts of media attention and online speculation followed the deaths at the end of January. Yet, Bornhorn said they were all “isolated incidents” and not reflective of broader trends. Two incidents, he said, were domestic incidents involving alcohol. The last resulted from a long-brewing conflict between two mutually aggrieved parties. He did not offer details on the individual cases beyond that.
“Over the past seven, eight months, we’ve been geared more towards intelligence-led policing,” Bornhorn said. “So our officers just don’t drive around, aimlessly looking for crime. We know where the bad stuff happens, and there’s not a whole lot of bad stuff happening in Latonia.”
Intelligence-led policing refers to policing based on reliable reports from sources within the community rather than relying on patrols to stumble across crime haphazardly. To that end, Bornhorn discussed the police department’s data-gathering efforts based on human intelligence, which he said could be used to pinpoint particular hot spots of criminal activity throughout the city. The problem was, he said, the data was still largely incomplete, only dating back a few months, which wasn’t super helpful for establishing trends.
Beyond this, the Covington Police Department submits its crime reporting data to the FBI, which maintains a public database for the entire country. The available data from the Covington Police Department goes from 2009 to 2022 and seems to bear out Bornhorn’s statements. Violent crime generally has been trending down over the past few years. There were two reported homicides in Covington in 2022, according to the FBI, both of which involved handguns.
“The data speaks for itself,” Bornhorn said.
Still, people at the meeting had questions.
“Does Covington have a gang problem?” asked long-time Latonia resident and former teacher at Holmes High School Carolyn Gaddis.
Not in the strictest sense, Bornhorn said. There aren’t organized and disciplined criminal networks engaging in coordinated violent activity, he said. Instead, there are small groups of kids emulating what they think gangsters are, tagging buildings and doing other petty crimes.
Another attendee, who did not share her name but said she’d lived in Latonia for about 30 years, argued that the number of random gunshots in town she’d heard over three or four years seemed to have increased. She described a seemingly random shoot-out near her house as an example.
Bornhorn reiterated his point that, from the police’s perspective, the problem wasn’t as dire as it sometimes seemed. But he qualified that statement by saying that oftentimes, people didn’t report when they hear gunshots, which can make it hard to map the breadth of the problem.
“A lot of those types of calls that people are telling me about, we’re not getting them,” Bornhorn said.
Pastor Dan Francis of Latonia Baptist Church, who is a Holmes High graduate and who lost a brother to gun violence, agreed that the numbers didn’t bear out an increased trend in death, but he warned that guns were continuing to proliferate throughout the community.
“I want everybody to understand that gun availability is on the rise,” Francis said. “Homicides are not…, but gun availability was really a major reason for this situation that developed,” he said, referencing the events from January.
Discussion continued, and Bornhorn encouraged all attendees to stay engaged in their communities. He also emphasized that community members should report crimes and suspected crimes.
“If you see something, report it,” Bornhorn said.
Coffee also recommended that people get involved in Latonia Uptown, the Latonia Business Council or other volunteer community groups so that people could contribute to community safety efforts.
Latonia Uptown meets the third Thursday of every month at 6:30 p.m. at The Latonia Community Building on Winston Avenue. Anyone with any questions about Latonia Uptown or other ways to get involved in the community can contact April Coffee at acoffee8311@gmail.com.
View real time crime data in Covington at the department’s Lexis Nexis Community Crime Map.
Besides 911 for emergency calls, here are the other numbers for the different departments of the Covington Police Department:
Patrol Supervisors (for learning about criminal situations in progress): (859)292-2258
Criminal Investigations Bureau: (859)292-2234
Narcotics/Vice (D-Team): (859)292-2236
Traffic Unit: (859)292-2252
Records Unit: (859)292-2230
Crime Lab: (859)292-2227
To file an Officer complaint, please call (859)292-2258