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The underreporting began in 2013, after the department switched to its current incident-based reporting system, which allows law enforcement to better classify multiple crimes that occur within a single incident.
The Columbus (Ohio) Division of Police has been underreporting crimes to the state and the FBI for about a decade, the department revealed on Friday.
The underreporting began in 2013, after the department switched to its current incident-based reporting system, which allows law enforcement to better classify multiple crimes that occur within a single incident, NBC4 reports. The FBI also transitioned to an incident-based reporting system in 2021.
The implementation resulted in an unnoticed system error in the submission process of the department’s data to Ohio’s Incident Based Crime Reporting System, which reports the statistics to the FBI. This resulted in 165,000 cases out of 1.9 million, or 8.4%, not being reported over the past decade. The department discovered the issue during a recent internal review, Myers said.
The errors in the system resulted in three years, 2013 through 2015, where the department reported data to the state and FBI that said crime had dropped, when it was actually rising. However, after that point, while not all the data was accurate, it was consistent with overall trends.
Police departments are not required to report their crime data to the FBI, and do so voluntarily. In 2023, over 16,000 law enforcement agencies submitted data to the FBI through its Uniform Crime Reporting Program, covering a combined 94.3% of the country’s population.
The program has published crime statistics since 1930. Data on the FBI’s website is available going back to 1985, and the Columbus police department has provided data since then, at least.