SAN JOSE — As burglary and thefts rose in recent years, the city’s understaffed police department struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of reports. In many cases, all that responding officers could do is take a report, offer a resident a sympathetic word, and add another dot to the city’s crime map.

Periodically, those dots would be connected and lead to the arrest of a burglary crew. Even then, that kind of work was often drawn from extra hours that officers put in on top of their scheduled shifts.

But with staffing showing steady recovery from a decade-long officer exodus, the San Jose Police Department is looking to make those big busts more common. Enter the newly minted Burglary Prevention Unit, a team of dedicated detectives whose sole job will be to conduct proactive investigations to thwart residential and commercial theft in the city.

“There are a number of things that haven’t been done, like using data to link reports together, and tying a lot of the same suspects to a lot of these crimes. We just haven’t had the manpower to follow these leads,” said veteran Lt. Greg Lombardo, who is overseeing the new squad. “Now that staffing levels have improved, this specialized unit can focus on burglaries and taking proactive steps to reduce burglaries before residents are victimized, instead of just reacting.”

In addition to Lombardo, the BPU consists of a sergeant, a probation officer, and eight detectives handpicked from other divisions in the department. It is the second largest investigative team in SJPD, behind the sex-crimes unit, and was welcome news to Mayor Sam Liccardo.

“I join thousands of residents who are thrilled to have more officers focused on our neighborhood crimes,” Liccardo said in a statement. “Burglars would do well to find another line of work.”

Chief Eddie Garcia said the new detail is a revival of sorts, noting that a burglary prevention team once worked in SJPD in the 1970s and 1980s. The BPU launch comes as property crimes dominate the public crime profile of the city.

“We’re hearing loud and clear that burglaries and robberies are a huge concern,” Garcia said. “Proactive investigative police work is the way we will make a dent in the burglary problem, I have no doubt.”

Garcia said he envisions that the dedicated officers will also stop robberies in the process, given that the crews they’re targeting are often responsible for violent thefts. Over the past year, SJPD has arrested multiple clusters of adults and teens tied to sprees of burglaries, robberies and carjackings.

“A hundred burglaries aren’t committed by a hundred different people, it’s usually different crews,” he said. “If you’re out there taking out these crews, solving these cases, you’re preventing dozens more crimes from occurring.”

Willow Glen residents, meanwhile, have called attention to a rash of break-ins and tense encounters with would-be home invaders. Neighborhood association president Elizabeth Estensen said she has noticed that intruders are becoming more aggressive.

“Now it’s changed, and they’re violent,” Estensen said. “There is more brazen activity going on. Word got out that police were limited and are not going to come out to certain calls. I think it’s great about the steps (police are) taking for prevention.”

Reported home burglaries in San Jose have been trending downward since a recent peak in 2012, with a 12 percent drop to 2,312 cases from 2016 to 2017, according to department figures. But commercial thefts are sharply on the rise, on pace to surpass 1,900 cases by year’s end, which would mark a 24 percent increase over 2017.

The key word, Lombardo said, is “reported.” Like others who monitor police activity, he surmises that reported numbers have skewed down in part because the city’s self-acknowledged lackluster response to burglaries over the past few years — so that violent crimes and other more immediate emergencies could be prioritized — may have discouraged some burglary victims from bothering to call police.

But if the BPU increases public confidence in the police department’s ability to crack down on the thefts, Lombardo said, the city might actually see a rise in burglary numbers.

“We’re going to discover burglaries not reported,” he said. “There could be an increase.”

Lombardo is careful about what to reveal about the new squad, given that some of their tactics are of a clandestine nature. But he says that his detectives — who augment but do not replace, the existing SJPD burglary unit — will monitor the Internet including social media to keep an eye on burglars who use the web to coordinate, and often times openly brag about their exploits.

The BPU has been active for about a month, and even as the detectives were in the midst of training and becoming accustomed to the methods of their new team back in June, they recovered $200,000 worth of infant formula that had been stolen from Bay Area businesses, Lombardo said.

In addition to working to identify burglary characteristics that point to a common culprit, Lombardo said the new burglary unit also will focus on ensuring secondhand dealers comply with legal rules that require them to properly register items they acquire. He said that would make such dealers less likely to accept property they suspect might be stolen, reducing the chances that burglars will make money off their crimes.

Longtime Willow Glen resident Debbie Uharriet also was encouraged by the work Lombardo and his team are doing, and stressed that residents need to keep banding together to serve as eyes and ears for each other. But she, like Estensen, voiced concern about what she considers lenient consequences for suspects in property crimes that lead to them being back on the streets in short time.

“We as the people have to do our part too,” she said. “And we need tougher laws on the books.”