DENVER—It appears Denver may not be as safe as reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year after the Denver Police Department determined that hundreds of crimes in Denver were not included in FBI statistics last year, largely because of officer and computer errors.
Authorities said 25 percent of the homicides in 2012 are not reflected in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which experts say is an important tool in examining overall crime trends nationally.
Analysts say the reports are important.
“People look at (report) numbers to see if they should locate in a town, or invest in a town, or work there. If I’m a developer, first thing I’ll look at is how much crime there is,” said Michael Walker, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, who also sits on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report subcommittee.
Denver police are blaming officer error and software glitches.
The Denver Post reported earlier this month ( ) that discrepancies between the FBI and department data are vast:
—The FBI report says violent crime in Denver fell 3.6 percent in 2012 from the year before. Data provided by the police department show a 9.3 percent increase.
—The FBI numbers indicate a nearly 4 percent drop in aggravated assaults, yet Denver police show an 11 percent increase from 2011 to last year.
—There were 38 killings in the city in 2012, according to the police department’s data, and 28 by the FBI’s count.
FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer said in an e-mail that if a law enforcement agency’s data does not pass edit checks, it sends the agency an error report for review. The numbers released this month are preliminary; a final report on crime in 2012 is due out later this year.
“We knew they were missing a significant number of homicides, and we didn’t know why,” said Lt. Matt Murray, a department spokesman.
Denver police officials last week met with representatives from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which passes data from departments across the state to the FBI for its annual report. They formed a task force to review the discrepancies.
Unintentional errors, such as an officer’s failure to make note of the relationship between a crime victim and a suspect, can cause the FBI to reject the entire report. Also common are errors that occur when officers change suspect descriptions in a report, but accidentally miss a field, Murray said.
The FBI also rejects a report if no suspect description is included, or if the incorrect code is used to identify evidence collected in a case, Murray said.
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Information from: The Denver Post,
