Rancho Cordova police arrested 3 for illegal firework use on week of July 4, department says
Rancho Cordova police and the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District released some numbers Tuesday about illegal fireworks activity around the Fourth of July, reporting three arrests that week as dispatchers received more than 150 calls.
The Rancho Cordova Police Department said in a video news release that it more than doubled patrols the week of July 1-8, confiscated over 130 pounds of fireworks and had 153 calls regarding illegal displays.
Police and Metro Fire say they used an education-based approach to enforcement and limiting illegal firework use this year. Authorities were also assisted by neighborhood watch programs and tips from the community.
Rancho Cordova, a city of about 75,000 people, represents just a small portion of Metro Fire’s jurisdiction, which includes much of Sacramento County outside Sacramento city limits.
A heat map (pun intended?) provided by the police department showed a bulk of the illegal firework activity happened in so-called “old” Rancho Cordova: mainly in neighborhoods north of Highway 50.
Officials with the Sacramento Fire Department and Metro Fire told The Bee on July 5 there was heavy activity the night of July 4, with dozens of firework or “holiday activity” fires sparking within several hours inside city and county limits.
Sacramento Fire Department spokesman Capt. Keith Wade said at the time that crews responded to 73 fire-related calls to dispatch between 7 p.m. July 4 and 1 a.m. July 5. He also noted “huge amounts” of illegal displays lighting up the sky.
Wade also explained how hard it can be to make arrests for illegal firework use, or for investigators to figure out whether an illegal firework was to blame for a fire on such an active night.
“The difficulty in determining” whether an incident was caused by legal or illegal fireworks, Wade said the morning of July 5, “is you need to have basically an eyewitness who is staying on-scene to have some sort of report. You can imagine the difficulty in pinpointing that.”
A Metro Fire spokesperson previously gave an unofficial count of 16 firework- or “holiday activity”-related fires sparking the evening of July 4.
