The Columbus Division of Police discovered that for about a decade, they've been underreporting crime statistics to the state and federal government.
This undercount of cases includes more than 100,000 offenses, ranging from 18 murders to more than 19,000 thefts. The city says they are now fixing the issue.
Of note, the undercounted numbers appeared to report a drop in violent crime between 2013 and 2014, which was not the case.
CPD Deputy Chief Tim Myers says he department has accurate numbers of these crimes, but some of the numbers got caught in the systems that allow them to be reported to the state and federal government. These are known as the Ohio Incident Based Reporting System and the National Incident Based Reporting System.
"Essentially there is a problem with our workflow as to certain offense reports where they did not make it to the state of Ohio for statistical purposes," Myers said. "This is an issue that's been going on under the radar since 2013, so it affects a substantial number of cases."
Myers said it is important to point out that this didn't effect casework.
"This is not an operational issue. This is purely a statistical issue. These cases were reported. These cases were investigated. In many instances, people were charged with crimes, convicted of crimes," Myers said.
Overall, 165,000 cases are still pending submission to the state database in what Myers called "case purgatory." They got caught in there for various reasons, including the system only picking the highest-level crime to report if multiple crimes were reported as part of a singular incident.
Some are also crimes that are city crimes, but may not have an equivalent in state or federal law.
Of those 165,000 crimes, 42,000 are what CPD considers "Part 1" offenses. Myers said 9,408 of those are violent crimes and 32,711 are property offenses.
Those include:
- 18 murders
- 2,384 rapes
- 2,137 robberies
- 4,869 aggravated assaults
- 5,987 motor vehicle thefts
- 7,470 burglaries
- 19,254 larcenies/thefts
Myers says this is a national problem affecting multiple agencies that moved to a new version of the reporting system.
"This is something across the country that agencies are grappling with. I'm very pleased that we were an early adopter of the IVR systems. But I think it also, you know, created some hiccups," Myers said.
The city was an early adopter of this system back in 2004. An update to the system in 2013 is when Myers said those "hiccups" began.
Myers provided charts that show how violent crimes were undercounted in these systems between 2013 and present day.
In 2013, the violent crimes that were reported showed a clear downward trend between 2013 and about 2019, according to one chart. However, if the crimes that weren't reported are added back in, it actually shows violent crime increased in that time before declining briefly between 2017 and 2018.
Despite also undercounting property crime, the overall downward trend since 2013 was not significantly impacted.
Myers said they didn't want to fix the statistical undercounting and not explain what was going on.
"Even though it's just a statistical issue, we didn't want to fix it and not explain what was going on," Myers said. "We didn't want people who were paying attention to crime in Columbus to not have an explanation for why they're seeing the numbers change."
Myers said that fix should occur over the next few months.
