HPD crime data lapse unacceptable

The Honolulu Police Department holds the dubious distinction of being the only major city or county law-enforcement agency in the country that has failed to report recent crime statistics to the national Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program.

This lapse is more than embarrassment. It signals a management failure. HPD should have placed a higher priority on swiftly resolving the staffing shortages and technical challenges that department officials blame for the reporting backlog.

Problems with HPD’s reportedly antiquated records-management computer system can’t be wholly to blame, given that HPD has managed to comply in the past. The FBI has administered the crime-reporting program since 1930, long before records were computerized. Police departments throughout the country have adapted through the decades to the changing reporting demands, and HPD must too.

If more data-entry clerks were needed to input officers’ daily field reports into the format necessary for the UCR, managers should have recognized that need and responded, redirecting resources as necessary.

The FBI estimates that nearly 95 percent of Americans are served by police departments that participate in the UCR program, which tracks eight specific crimes from city, university and college, county, state, tribal and federal law enforcement agencies.

Those crimes are murder and non-negligent man- slaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle and arson.

Beyond the top-line totals, though, the data reported by law-enforcement agencies nationwide contain a detailed array of crime data. The depth of data reported — in details such as gender and age of suspects and victims, weapons used, where robberies occurred — are integral in analysis and detection of trends.

Failing to report to the program does not mean that HPD has lost track of how many of those crimes occurred on Oahu. The department can compile crime statistics from dispatch calls and officers’ field reports, to guide commanders’ and supervisors’ daily work.

But it does leave a real void in the timely and accurate crime-trend information available to and needed by numerous agencies, departments and policymakers involved in the criminal justice system, not to mention homebuyers and real-estate agents, tourism executives and visitors, social-service agencies and grant-seekers — just about anyone who wants to know what type and how many crimes occur in Honolulu.

The comprehensive UCR reports make it possible to easily assess year-to-year trends, and to compare regional differences.

"Everyone recognizes this data is important to determine whether crime is up or down. It’s a social indicator along the lines of GDP (gross domestic product)," said Paul Perrone, chief of research and statistics for the state attorney general’s office, who is rightly alarmed at how far behind HPD has fallen.

The department is supposed to submit the data to the AG’s office, which compiles it for the FBI.

The bureau last week released UCR data for the first half of 2014 for communities across the country with populations of 100,000, but had no information to share regarding Oahu’s crime rate. Honolulu’s most recent data on the FBI website are from 2010. Data from 2011, 2012, 2013 and the first six months of 2014 are missing.

An HPD spokeswoman said the department is working with a private vendor on a new record-keeping system to simplify data entry and correct the backlog. Roughly 400,000 reports are entered into the records- management system annually, she said.

That’s a heavy workload, to be sure. The problem here is not only the volume of work, though, but the low priority it seems to be given. While a handful of states require police departments to report crime statistics for the UCR, in Hawaii that task is voluntary. It shouldn’t be.

Honolulu can’t fairly claim to be among the safest cities in the United States without the current, comparable statistics to back that claim up.