M A Larkey
2024-09-08 04:33:58 UTC
ST. LOUIS — Another round of technical problems in the city police
department caused the FBI to publish artificially low crime totals for
the city for the second time in less than a year.
St. Louis police say problems in its records system prevented them from
sending crime data to the state, as required by Missouri law, for more
than three months, leading the FBI to mistakenly publish incomplete
crime numbers for the city in its first-quarter national report this year.
The bureau acknowledged the error after a Post-Dispatch review of local,
state and FBI data found the national report’s totals for St. Louis were
too low.
“We have been candid about the issues surrounding our ability/inability
to successfully transmit data,” said St. Louis police Sgt. Charles Wall
in an email. The department worked with Optimum Technology, the vendor
that maintains its records system, to resolve the problems, he said.
St. Louis’ outage and the FBI’s mistake are the latest setbacks as
police here and across the U.S. transition to a different way of
tracking crime called the National Incident-Based Reporting System. A
longer data interruption here last year led the FBI to publish
misleading annual totals for St. Louis, derived from just 11 months of
data, in its major crime publications for 2021.
The change to NIBRS was intended to give a more complete picture of
crime across the country by capturing greater detail on incidents,
victims and offenders. But police agencies have struggled to make the
switch, leaving enormous gaps in the data-gathering effort.
The technical problems in St. Louis lasted more than three months
beginning in April and kept the city from reporting some data from the
first three months of 2023. The city resumed data submissions in July.
Wall noted that while the city could not submit detailed data to the
state, which sends it on to the FBI, it never stopped posting simple
crime totals on its website each month for the public to see.
The FBI said in a statement that it is “working to develop additional
algorithms against the publication tables to detect this type of
anomaly,” and that it would update future reports with corrected data
once the system issues are resolved.
Repeat failure
The latest failure comes after the FBI made similar assurances last
October in response to a Post-Dispatch report on a similar pattern: St.
Louis’ delayed data submissions led to errors in the bureau’s annual
crime publications.
That time, St. Louis police stopped reporting crime data to the state
for eight months beginning in December 2021. A flaw in the FBI’s systems
led the bureau to wrongly count St. Louis as having reported a full year
of crime data for 2021 when it had only reported 11 months’ worth.
The bureau then ran those incomplete totals for St. Louis in its “Crime
in the United States” and “National Incident-Based Reporting System”
publications for 2021, when the city should have been excluded entirely.
And those artificially low annual totals are permanently enshrined, as
the FBI doesn’t correct mistakes in its annual publications after they
are released.
In contrast, the FBI’s flawed first-quarter report for this year has
already been replaced with the second quarter’s data — which correctly
excludes St. Louis because the city failed to submit some data in the
second quarter, too.
This short shelf life is by design. The ”Quarterly Uniform Crime Report”
is a relatively new tool, introduced in 2020. It is published quickly
with minimal auditing, to give the public access to preliminary national
data ahead of the bureau’s larger annual publications.
But data analyst Jeff Asher has noted problems with the FBI’s quarterly
reports. For the fourth quarter of 2022, he found that the FBI gave much
lower murder totals for Dallas, Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and Memphis,
Tennessee, than the agencies reported themselves in other publications.
“The quarterly data is mostly useless,” said Asher, cofounder of AH
Datalytics, a consulting firm that tracks crime data for cities across
the U.S.
‘The most basic question’
For years, police departments across the country have been upgrading
their records systems to begin using the new, more detailed NIBRS format
for reporting crime data. The FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics
provided $120 million in federal funding to help departments make the
transition, including a $1.2 million grant for St. Louis to implement a
new records system.
But the transition remains rocky.
That became evident after 2021, when the FBI stopped accepting data in
the old “summary” format, and required agencies to use NIBRS. That year,
more than 7,000 of nearly 19,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide
failed to submit any crime data at all, and only 52% submitted a full
year’s worth — a massive decline from previous years.
With data missing or incomplete for so many agencies — including New
York City — the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics were forced to
use “well-established estimation techniques” to fill in the gaps in the
2021 national report, and they cautioned against comparing the 2021 data
with previous years.
Researchers bemoaned the lack of clarity on national crime trends,
especially as political rhetoric on crime heated up ahead of last year’s
mid-term elections.
However, participation has been improving slowly since then.
“Crime remains a hot political issue, but the FBI’s data for 2022 will
be more reliable than the 2021 data,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a
criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
The bureau’s national crime publications for 2022 are likely to be
released later this month. The data in them will be based on a higher
agency participation rate, 78%, than in 2021, Rosenfeld said, but some
estimation will still be necessary.
Participation is much higher in Missouri, where data collection is not
voluntary. By Sept. 26, 529 departments here, covering 98.6% of the
state’s population, were submitting data in the NIBRS format, according
to the state Department of Public Safety.
State law requires police agencies to submit uniform crime reports to
the Highway Patrol, which then forwards the data to the FBI. Missouri’s
Department of Public Safety, which oversees the effort, considers
agencies out of compliance when they fail to submit crime data for at
least three months.
Agencies that fall out of compliance may be ineligible for state and
federal grants. But that didn’t happen last year in St. Louis.
The Department of Public Safety awarded the city two grants last summer
worth more than $110,000, even as St. Louis was at least six months
behind in reporting crime data. It’s not clear yet if St. Louis has
faced any grant withholdings this year.
‘Significant growing pains’
In St. Louis, “there have been significant growing pains” as the
department switched to a new records system in order to adopt NIBRS,
said Wall, the police spokesman. He noted the department weathered
similar issues 20 years ago during another technology change.
St. Louis’ most recent delay began on April 5. When the department
uploaded its March 2023 data, it “received a FAIL from the State site,”
according to an email to Subashini Arrib, a project manager at Optimum
Technology, written by Jerry Baumgartner, the department’s planning and
research manager, and obtained through a records request.
Internal status reports starting the first week of April, also obtained
in a records request, show the department considered the performance of
the records management system and other problems to be “major issues”
for months.
Asked if St. Louis was concerned or dissatisfied with Optimum
Technology, the vendor implementing the new records system, Wall said
the department continues to work with them and was “confident that any
issues that may arise in the future will be addressed more expeditiously.”
St. Louis seems to be the only department of its size in Missouri to
have had extended, multi-month interruptions. Police departments in both
Kansas City and St. Louis County have continuously reported crime data
without stopping for longer than four weeks since they obtained
certification for their new systems from the Highway Patrol in recent
years, spokesmen for both departments confirmed.
Kansas City uses a records system from Niche Technology that launched in
2019. St. Louis County uses its own homegrown system, CARE, which it
upgraded with a $103,875 federal grant to become NIBRS compliant.
Even among dozens of much smaller departments across St. Louis County,
such interruptions are rare. On Sept. 1, only four — Calverton Park,
Hillsdale, Northwoods and Warson Woods — were more than three months
behind in reporting, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of data from
the Highway Patrol.
Northwoods and Warson Woods each blamed the interruptions on hardware
and software upgrades that were underway. Calverton Park Chief Scott
Amos said his department had been uploading data to the Highway Patrol,
but a problem with the patrol’s system had kept the data from displaying
on its showmecrime.mo.gov crime portal.
Since then, Northwoods and Warson Woods have caught up, and data for
Calverton Park has begun to appear on the state website.
Hillsdale police did not respond to questions from the Post-Dispatch.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-courts/fbi-publishes-wrong-crime-numbers-for-st-louis-again-amid-technology-woes-for-city-police/article_fb15e330-5edc-11ee-a393-4749cf8f2bd6.html
department caused the FBI to publish artificially low crime totals for
the city for the second time in less than a year.
St. Louis police say problems in its records system prevented them from
sending crime data to the state, as required by Missouri law, for more
than three months, leading the FBI to mistakenly publish incomplete
crime numbers for the city in its first-quarter national report this year.
The bureau acknowledged the error after a Post-Dispatch review of local,
state and FBI data found the national report’s totals for St. Louis were
too low.
“We have been candid about the issues surrounding our ability/inability
to successfully transmit data,” said St. Louis police Sgt. Charles Wall
in an email. The department worked with Optimum Technology, the vendor
that maintains its records system, to resolve the problems, he said.
St. Louis’ outage and the FBI’s mistake are the latest setbacks as
police here and across the U.S. transition to a different way of
tracking crime called the National Incident-Based Reporting System. A
longer data interruption here last year led the FBI to publish
misleading annual totals for St. Louis, derived from just 11 months of
data, in its major crime publications for 2021.
The change to NIBRS was intended to give a more complete picture of
crime across the country by capturing greater detail on incidents,
victims and offenders. But police agencies have struggled to make the
switch, leaving enormous gaps in the data-gathering effort.
The technical problems in St. Louis lasted more than three months
beginning in April and kept the city from reporting some data from the
first three months of 2023. The city resumed data submissions in July.
Wall noted that while the city could not submit detailed data to the
state, which sends it on to the FBI, it never stopped posting simple
crime totals on its website each month for the public to see.
The FBI said in a statement that it is “working to develop additional
algorithms against the publication tables to detect this type of
anomaly,” and that it would update future reports with corrected data
once the system issues are resolved.
Repeat failure
The latest failure comes after the FBI made similar assurances last
October in response to a Post-Dispatch report on a similar pattern: St.
Louis’ delayed data submissions led to errors in the bureau’s annual
crime publications.
That time, St. Louis police stopped reporting crime data to the state
for eight months beginning in December 2021. A flaw in the FBI’s systems
led the bureau to wrongly count St. Louis as having reported a full year
of crime data for 2021 when it had only reported 11 months’ worth.
The bureau then ran those incomplete totals for St. Louis in its “Crime
in the United States” and “National Incident-Based Reporting System”
publications for 2021, when the city should have been excluded entirely.
And those artificially low annual totals are permanently enshrined, as
the FBI doesn’t correct mistakes in its annual publications after they
are released.
In contrast, the FBI’s flawed first-quarter report for this year has
already been replaced with the second quarter’s data — which correctly
excludes St. Louis because the city failed to submit some data in the
second quarter, too.
This short shelf life is by design. The ”Quarterly Uniform Crime Report”
is a relatively new tool, introduced in 2020. It is published quickly
with minimal auditing, to give the public access to preliminary national
data ahead of the bureau’s larger annual publications.
But data analyst Jeff Asher has noted problems with the FBI’s quarterly
reports. For the fourth quarter of 2022, he found that the FBI gave much
lower murder totals for Dallas, Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and Memphis,
Tennessee, than the agencies reported themselves in other publications.
“The quarterly data is mostly useless,” said Asher, cofounder of AH
Datalytics, a consulting firm that tracks crime data for cities across
the U.S.
‘The most basic question’
For years, police departments across the country have been upgrading
their records systems to begin using the new, more detailed NIBRS format
for reporting crime data. The FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics
provided $120 million in federal funding to help departments make the
transition, including a $1.2 million grant for St. Louis to implement a
new records system.
But the transition remains rocky.
That became evident after 2021, when the FBI stopped accepting data in
the old “summary” format, and required agencies to use NIBRS. That year,
more than 7,000 of nearly 19,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide
failed to submit any crime data at all, and only 52% submitted a full
year’s worth — a massive decline from previous years.
With data missing or incomplete for so many agencies — including New
York City — the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics were forced to
use “well-established estimation techniques” to fill in the gaps in the
2021 national report, and they cautioned against comparing the 2021 data
with previous years.
Researchers bemoaned the lack of clarity on national crime trends,
especially as political rhetoric on crime heated up ahead of last year’s
mid-term elections.
However, participation has been improving slowly since then.
“Crime remains a hot political issue, but the FBI’s data for 2022 will
be more reliable than the 2021 data,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a
criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
The bureau’s national crime publications for 2022 are likely to be
released later this month. The data in them will be based on a higher
agency participation rate, 78%, than in 2021, Rosenfeld said, but some
estimation will still be necessary.
Participation is much higher in Missouri, where data collection is not
voluntary. By Sept. 26, 529 departments here, covering 98.6% of the
state’s population, were submitting data in the NIBRS format, according
to the state Department of Public Safety.
State law requires police agencies to submit uniform crime reports to
the Highway Patrol, which then forwards the data to the FBI. Missouri’s
Department of Public Safety, which oversees the effort, considers
agencies out of compliance when they fail to submit crime data for at
least three months.
Agencies that fall out of compliance may be ineligible for state and
federal grants. But that didn’t happen last year in St. Louis.
The Department of Public Safety awarded the city two grants last summer
worth more than $110,000, even as St. Louis was at least six months
behind in reporting crime data. It’s not clear yet if St. Louis has
faced any grant withholdings this year.
‘Significant growing pains’
In St. Louis, “there have been significant growing pains” as the
department switched to a new records system in order to adopt NIBRS,
said Wall, the police spokesman. He noted the department weathered
similar issues 20 years ago during another technology change.
St. Louis’ most recent delay began on April 5. When the department
uploaded its March 2023 data, it “received a FAIL from the State site,”
according to an email to Subashini Arrib, a project manager at Optimum
Technology, written by Jerry Baumgartner, the department’s planning and
research manager, and obtained through a records request.
Internal status reports starting the first week of April, also obtained
in a records request, show the department considered the performance of
the records management system and other problems to be “major issues”
for months.
Asked if St. Louis was concerned or dissatisfied with Optimum
Technology, the vendor implementing the new records system, Wall said
the department continues to work with them and was “confident that any
issues that may arise in the future will be addressed more expeditiously.”
St. Louis seems to be the only department of its size in Missouri to
have had extended, multi-month interruptions. Police departments in both
Kansas City and St. Louis County have continuously reported crime data
without stopping for longer than four weeks since they obtained
certification for their new systems from the Highway Patrol in recent
years, spokesmen for both departments confirmed.
Kansas City uses a records system from Niche Technology that launched in
2019. St. Louis County uses its own homegrown system, CARE, which it
upgraded with a $103,875 federal grant to become NIBRS compliant.
Even among dozens of much smaller departments across St. Louis County,
such interruptions are rare. On Sept. 1, only four — Calverton Park,
Hillsdale, Northwoods and Warson Woods — were more than three months
behind in reporting, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of data from
the Highway Patrol.
Northwoods and Warson Woods each blamed the interruptions on hardware
and software upgrades that were underway. Calverton Park Chief Scott
Amos said his department had been uploading data to the Highway Patrol,
but a problem with the patrol’s system had kept the data from displaying
on its showmecrime.mo.gov crime portal.
Since then, Northwoods and Warson Woods have caught up, and data for
Calverton Park has begun to appear on the state website.
Hillsdale police did not respond to questions from the Post-Dispatch.
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-courts/fbi-publishes-wrong-crime-numbers-for-st-louis-again-amid-technology-woes-for-city-police/article_fb15e330-5edc-11ee-a393-4749cf8f2bd6.html