Columbus police work to fix errors that led to undercounting of more than 100,000 crimes

The Columbus Police Department discovered that for about a decade, they had been underreporting crime statistics to the state and federal government.

This subcount of cases includes more than 100,000 crimes, ranging from 18 murders to more than 19,000 thefts. The city says it is now fixing the problem.

Notably, the undercounted figures appear to report a drop in violent crime between 2013 and 2014, which was not the case.

CPD Deputy Chief Tim Myers says the department has accurate numbers of these crimes, but some of the numbers have been caught in the systems that allow them to be reported to the state and federal government. These are known as the Ohio Incident Reporting System and the National Incident Reporting System.

“Essentially, there’s an issue with our workflow in terms of certain crime reports where they didn’t make it to the state of Ohio for statistical purposes,” Myers said. “This is an issue that has been going on under the radar since 2013, so it affects a substantial number of cases.”

Myers said it’s important to stress that this hasn’t affected case work.

“This is not an operational issue. This is purely a statistical issue. These cases have been reported. These cases have been investigated. In many cases, people have been charged with crimes, convicted of crimes,” Myers said.

In all, 165,000 cases are still pending submission to the state database in what Myers called “case purgatory.” They were caught there for various reasons, including the system choosing only the highest-level crime to report if multiple crimes were reported as part of a single incident.

Some are also crimes that are city crimes but may not have an equivalent in state or federal law.

Of the 165,000 offences, 42,000 are what the CPD considers ‘Part 1’ offences. Myers said 9,408 of those are violent crimes and 32,711 are property crimes.

These include:

  • 18 murders
  • 2,384 rapes
  • 2,137 robberies
  • 4,869 aggravated assaults
  • 5,987 car thefts
  • 7,470 burglaries
  • 19,254 thefts/thefts

Myers says this is a national problem affecting several agencies that have switched to a new version of the reporting system.

“This is something across the country that agencies are dealing with. I am very pleased to have been one of the early adopters of IVR systems. But I think it also, you know, created some hiccups,” Myers said.

The city was an early adopter of the system in 2004. An update to the system in 2013 is when Myers said those “hiccups” started.

Myers provided graphs showing how violent crime has been underreported in these systems between 2013 and today.

A chart shows the number of violent crimes underreported by the Columbus Police Department from 2008 to 2023.

Columbus Police Division

A graph shows the number of violent crimes underreported by the Columbus Police Department from 2008 to 2023.

In 2013, violent crimes that were reported showed a clear downward trend between 2013 and about 2019, according to a chart. However, if unreported crimes are added back, it actually shows that violent crime increased during that time before briefly falling between 2017 and 2018.

Despite the fact that property crimes are also underestimated, the overall downward trend since 2013 has not been significantly affected.

A graph shows the number of property crimes undercounted by the Columbus Police Division from 2008 to 2023.

Columbus Police Division

A graph shows the number of property crimes undercounted by the Columbus Police Division from 2008 to 2023.

Myers said they don’t want to fix the statistical undercount and don’t explain what’s going on.

“Even though it’s just a statistical problem, we didn’t want to solve it and not explain what’s going on,” Myers said. “We didn’t want people who were paying attention to crime in Columbus to not have an explanation for why they were seeing the numbers change.”

Myers said the fix should happen in the next few months.