At the March 23 Council Meeting, Police Chief Paul Spencer presented the Addison Police Department's (APD) 2020 Annual Report. This report includes a statistical review of the year, notable events from the patrol and criminal investigation divisions, and goals and objectives for Fiscal Year 2021.
An important change in APD's reporting methodology took place in 2020. APD historically utilized the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program for the reporting of crime statistics. In December 2015, the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Advisory Policy Board passed a recommendation to transition all federal, state, county, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) by 2021. In response to that directive, APD began using NIBRS in 2020. Implemented to improve the overall quality of crime data collected by law enforcement, NIBRS captures details on each single crime incident as well as on separate offenses within the same incident. The additional data includes information on victims, known offenders, relationships between victims and offenders, arrestees, and property involved in crimes. Unlike data reported through the UCR, NIBRS goes much deeper because of its ability to provide circumstances and context for crimes like location, time of day, and whether the incident was cleared.
NIBRS collects data for 52 offenses, plus 10 additional offenses for which only arrests are reported. UCR counts limited data for 10 offenses and 20 additional crimes for which only arrests are reported. Data collected by APD prior to 2020 under UCR will show a much lower incidence of crime than the data collected under NIBRS because the UCR data only covers a narrow range of criminal activity compared to NIBRS. Comparisons between URC and NIBRS data will not provide an accurate representation of the annual change in overall criminal activity.
