CLAY COUNTY – It’s easy to see active holiday spending around this time of the year with Black Friday and Christmas shoppers being drenched in hot chocolate and happy greetings. Luckily, that hasn’t led to an increase in crime, the Clay County Sheriff’s Office said.

A quick flash through TV news might reveal the stampedes through department stores on Black Friday or package thievery happening nationwide, but Clay County remains relatively business-as-usual as far as crime goes. CCSO and the Orange Park Police Department treat the holidays days as they would any other.

“(Looking at numbers over the past five years), there’s nothing that stood out to me,” sheriff’s office public information officer Ronnie Freshour said. “It looks like any other day. To specify, I don’t see a pattern that could be associated with these days.”

As people bust through Walmart doors after the can’t-miss deal on a TV, imagining a situation where a fight breaks out or something along those lines isn’t too difficult. It happens every year around the country, but Clay County seems to be more cordial than one might assume: nothing of the sort happened this year across the many stores in Clay County open for Black Friday.

To add numbers to the equation, Freshour said that Black Friday had about 57 calls in 2014, a number he said isn’t out of the ordinary. There were the same number of calls in 2015, and that number increased by 10 in 2016, but dropped to 37 calls for service in 2017. There were 60 last year but another decline to 38 calls this year.

“These are the numbers for actual case numbers pulled,” Freshour said. “If a case number got pulled, my understanding is that’s what these numbers are for.”

These numbers are specific to incidents and don’t include incidents where a deputy called in.

Freshour said the numbers are identical to those of Christmas and the surrounding days. Despite that, though, Freshour said CCSO amps up their personnel in areas prone to population spikes like the Orange Park Mall.

“There’s more people there around this time of the year and to be safe, we deploy more personnel there,” Freshour said.

Just because more police are monitoring an area does not mean more crime is predicted to happen, Freshour said. It’s a matter of matching the heightened numbers of people in a centralized location like the mall.

“If there’s more population, more of our presence will be there,” Freshour said.

These numbers are similar in incorporated parts of the county like Orange Park, which has its own police department. Orange Park Police Department Randy Case said Black Friday and other holidays around this time of the year are treated like any other day. Their numbers on Black Friday are similar to that of any other day and like with CCSO, OPPD doesn’t see any trends in shoplifting, car break-ins and purse-snatching that indicate Black Friday is more prone to crime.

“We pretty much have the same squads working on that day as we would any other,” Case said. “It’s not a scheduled day where we deploy extra officers.”

If numbers are any indication, Clay County is just as safe around this time of the year, which is simultaneously the best and most stressful time of the year for many, as it is on any given day. So next time you go Black Friday shopping or Christmas shopping at the mall, trust that the shoppers around you are just as unlikely to commit crime to get the perfect gift that you are.