The Columbia Police Department released a new public-oriented dashboard where people can access crime statistics in August.
South Patrol Assistant Chief Mark Fitzgerald says that context matters, and how you count the beans changes the numbers.
"We really don’t know what the underline crime rate is in the city, we have no idea," Fitzgerald said.
The dashboard has only been available for a couple of months as a way to increase police transparency for the public.
The National Incident Based Reporting System - or NIBRS - is the national standard for law enforcement crime data reporting. According to Fitzgerald, the data shown on the dashboard is underreported.
"We don’t know what’s not reported to us," Fitzgerald said. "The relationship between the police and the reporting or victim population plays a role in that."
Fitzgerald said, it's all cause and effect. The staffing shortages mean CPD can't respond as quickly to some calls.
"Last year, our staffing was in such a state that we would a shoplifting call from Walmart where the suspect wasn't in custody. It might be three or four hours before we had a cop available to respond to that report," Fitzgerald said.
CPD said they're notified of the report, but the information never makes its way to the transparency dashboard because they don't have all of the information needed to complete a police report.
"There's certainly retail establishments in the city of Columbia that have stopped reporting larcenies because they're waiting multiple hours for police service," Fitzgerald said.
Data may appear as though larceny crimes have decreased, but in reality the only decrease has been in the reporting of it.
"There's a whole category of offenses, they're called group B offenses that don't get reported unless an arrest is made," Fitzgerald said. "The more officers we have on the street, the more we're going to be able to be responsive to quality of life issues and smaller misdemeanor crimes, the more responsive we are, the more arrests we make and the more it looks like our crime rate is going up, when in fact, it's just an increase of customer service and an increase in staff."
To help alleviate staff and report shortages Police Chief Jill Schlude mentioned the a new solution.
"A huge piece of tomorrow is the new kickoff of our new record management system project," Schlude said. "We're going to be able to better use data in the system."
For CPD, Fitzgerald said it's time for a change.
"We've selected a vendor," Fitzgerald said. "We're trying to use technology to lower the staff time to accomplish specific job tasks. Maybe the two biggest reasons that we're going with this new vendor is using technology to reduce staff time to do administrative tasks involving our records management system."
Fitzgerald finished by mentioning that less staff time spent doing administrative tasks means more staff time out responding to crimes, which is expected to improve the statistics in the database.