Colorado agencies ahead of the curve on crime reporting

Colorado regulation enforcement companies carried out higher than a lot of their counterparts throughout the nation in reporting 2021 crime statistics to the FBI, based on information supplied to Axios by The Marshall Challenge, a felony justice watchdog group.

Why it issues: Not like residents of different cities and states, Coloradans can count on entry to complete information exhibiting developments in native crime, together with in metro Denver.

• Entry to dependable and widespread information helps “paint a extra vivid, correct image,” and “you want that to develop methods” to deal with the foundation problems with crime, Denver police chief Paul Pazen advised Axios Denver.

The massive image: 95% of the 247 Colorado regulation enforcement companies in The Marshall Challenge’s dataset submitted crime statistics overlaying all 12 months of 2021.

• In distinction, about 40% of regulation enforcement companies nationwide submitted nothing, together with police departments in New York Metropolis and Los Angeles.

Zoom in: Native regulation enforcement companies are required by state statute to submit crime information to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which shares that information with the FBI yearly.

• Companies for all of the state’s main metro areas — together with Denver, Colorado Springs and Aurora — participated in 2021.
• Simply 12 Colorado departments (overlaying areas with small populations) did not submit information.

What they’re saying: A number of companies that did not report, together with Greenwood Village and Federal Heights, advised Axios Denver it was for technical causes, and that their previous methods weren’t suitable with the FBI’s new Nationwide Incident-Primarily based Reporting System (NIBRS).

• “Our NIBRS reporting module was accomplished simply earlier than the reporting deadline, and we’re working via the backlog to submit our full information,” mentioned Federal Heights interim police chief Mike Domenighini. “Our intention is to at all times report federal information in a well timed method — technical points however.”

The backdrop: Final yr, the FBI retired its practically century-old crime information assortment program and switched to NIBRS, which gathers extra particular info on every incident.

• The FBI introduced the transition years in the past, and the federal authorities spent a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to assist native police make the swap. But practically 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 regulation enforcement companies didn’t ship crime information to the voluntary program in 2021.
• Colorado, in the meantime, started transitioning to the brand new system in 2013 to organize for the swap.

The underside line: “It should be actually onerous for policymakers to have a look at what crime seems like in their very own neighborhood and evaluate it to related communities,” Jacob Kaplan, a criminologist at Princeton College, mentioned.

Of observe: The FBI advised The Marshall Challenge in a press release that companies had till early March to be included in a full-year report, so remaining participation figures could fluctuate.

What to observe: The 2020 information confirmed that violent crime hit a 25-year excessive in Colorado.

• The complete figures for 2021, anticipated to be launched by the autumn, will probably be a high difficulty within the midterm elections.