FBI Releases Crime Stats

October 2, 2019

The FBI released 2018 crime stats this week based on information APD provided in February and released to the public shortly after that. The stats reflect a decrease from the record high crime in 2017.

The FBI report showed the following crime rates for 2018:

• Property Crime: 34,619 offenses per 100,000 residents
• Violent Crime: 7,646 offenses per 100,000 residents

“While the overall crime numbers are still too high, we continue to see encouraging trends when we dig into the numbers,” said APD Deputy Chief Harold Medina. “Auto theft decreased by 27% between 2017 and 2018, and it is down another 22% this year.

“Robbery is also down by a third this year, which shows we are climbing out of the hole created when crime was at an all-time high in 2017.”

APD is using a more modern system of reporting crimes requested by the FBI. The new system, called National Incident Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, captures details on separate offenses within the same incident, which allows law enforcement to identify circumstances and context for crimes.

However, the NIBRS data is not easily comparable to the old system of Unified Crime Reporting program. The old UCR data would only reflect one crime per incident, even though there may be multiple offenses. As a result, most police agencies that move to NIBRS experience as much as a 10% increase in all reported incidents.

In addition to crime data reported to the FBI each year, APD tracks crime stats through its internal Records Management System. Records from January through June reflect decreases in every crime category between 2017 and 2019.