By Shelby Stewart-Soldan

Staff Writer
Brandon Twp.— Police calls for service for Brandon Township are at 14,214 calls for 2023. That is an increase of 2,404 calls, or 20.4%, from 2022, according to the 2023 year-end report from Oakland County Sheriff’s Office Brandon Substation Commander Lt. Greg Glover.
“The numbers are up quite a bit,” he said. “Even though it’s more, it’s not something we can’t handle with the staff we have.”
The calls include both Brandon Township and the Village of Ortonville, The substation also saw an increase of traffic citations.
“We wrote 2,956 traffic citations, with an increase of 760 from last year,” he said. “A lot of that is because of the weigh-master traffic car. He himself wrote 680 tickets, which is substantial for out here.”
Of those 680 tickets, 34 of them were weigh-master citations for over-weight vehicles.
“Most garbage truck stops, those tickets are anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 on those overweight trucks,” said Glover.
The clearance rate for the township and village stayed about the same as it was last year at around 73.21%. Out of 125 Michigan Incident Crime Reporting (MICR) reported criminal offenses, 105 were in the township and 20 were in the village. Those cases are monitored by the federal government.
“Out of those 105 cases, 55 of those resulted in an arrest and 20 were exceptionally cleared, meaning more than likely they didn’t want to seek prosecution,” said Glover. “Brandon continues to have one of the highest clearance rates in the county. And the village only had 20 MICR reported criminal offenses. Seven resulted in arrest, and eight of them were exceptionally cleared.”
Ninety of those 125 cases were cleared. For 2022, the clearance rate was 73.15%
“Thats the stats that the federal government uses to determine which are the safest cities and villages in the state,” said Glover. “I’m proud to say all seven years I’ve been out here we’ve made those statistics. It really comes down to guys getting out there and not sitting behind a desk and making phone calls when it comes to investigating cases.”
One of the biggest challenges for the detective bureau is fraud cases, which include identity theft, wire fraud and bad checks.
“They’re cases that are almost impossible to investigate because often the responsibles aren’t even in this country,” he said. “And we still have people being severely ripped off by some of these people.”
There also continues to be a rise in the rates of car vs. deer accidents.
“We were getting 3-4 calls for car vs. deer accidents a shift,” said Glover.