The violent crimes unit and burglary unit will be more concise and specialized, Koval said. The violent crimes unit will focus on crimes involving weapons or personal injury such as homicide or armed robbery, while the burglary unit will focus on crimes such as home break-ins and robberies.

“These [violent crimes] are very up close and personal and leave victims in their midst because they’ve been face-to-face with their assailant or the robber or murderer,” Koval said. “These are personal crimes of a higher order.”

The burglary unit differs from the violent crime unit because the crime in these units involves property versus people, Koval said.

Even with this key difference, the burglary crimes are far from insignificant, Koval said.

“The Legislature has elevated [burglary crimes] to such a high stature … and we also believe [burglary] carries with it a psychological violation, that someone has been in your home without your consent going through your stuff,” Koval said.

These new units will hopefully be beneficial to those who live in downtown Madison, such as students residing in student housing, Despain said. In the event of a pattern of violence crime or burglaries, the individual units can be deployed to more adequately deal with the situation.

Moving forward, Koval said he is definitely interested in opening more specialized units if the current two perform well. Possibilities for new units could include focuses on issues such as domestic violence, sexual assault, juveniles and gang violence. Although Madison is not “off the charts” in terms of violent crimes and burglaries, Koval hopes these two new units will be able to bring violent trends down even lower.

“At the end of the day, we want to be more responsive to those emerging or trending crimes as they’re occurring,” Koval said. “While crime in Madison is not off the charts, there are clearly more upticks in the areas of violent crimes and burglary crimes so we want to stay abreast of those trends and use our resources accordingly to defeat those before they become the new normal.”