Crime, Cops, and CAPCOG: Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics for the Capital Area

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Author: Matt Holderread

Every year, the Texas Department of Public Safety publishes the Crime in Texas Report, which provides summary information on seven types of crimes tracked and reported  by law enforcement agencies that participate in Uniform Crime Reporting. These crimes include: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and auto theft. The uniformity of this reporting makes it easy to compare crime across the different law enforcement jurisdictions in Texas. In October 2017, the 2016 report was released. It contains information on the number of crimes reported, crimes cleared, and arrests made under each of the 7 index crimes.

Comparing crime data across all jurisdictions in the CAPCOG region can be useful to get a picture of crime trends and issues in the region’s different communities. Because the information provided in the Crime in Texas Report is presented in a format that makes analyzing the Capital Area difficult, we’ve compiled this information into a series of data visualizations below which includes some observations on total and violent crime in the CAPCOG region. Additional information and data on specific types of crime has been made available on CAPCOG’s Criminal Justice Resource Page.

Before discussing the data itself, there are a few important facets of the data to note. One difficulty when comparing crime across jurisdiction is differences in populations. To account for these differences across jurisdictions, we calculate the crime rate, which presents crimes per 100,000 residents. Looking at crime rates allows for more useful comparisons across jurisdictions, but it is also worth pointing out that in communities with small populations, a single crime has a very large impact on the crime rate. For example, each crime reported by the Austin PD (956,911 residents) increases their crime rate by around 0.1; while each crime reported in Mustang Ridge (990 residents) or Lexington (1,183 residents) increases the crime rate of those jurisdictions by around 100. Another challenge when working with crime rates is that Independent School Districts (ISD) and University Police Departments do not have any permanent residents, so calculating a crime rate per 100,000 residents is not possible.

Additionally, crime rates, which normalize data based on resident population, do not necessarily do a good job of accounting for non-resident activity. For example, if a small community is a large retail destination (e.g., Sunset Valley in Travis County), the resident population is a poor proxy for the total number of people in the community at any one time. As a general rule, small communities with lots of non-resident activity will have higher crime rates.

The Crime in Texas Report also contains information on the number of arrests made and number of crimes cleared by each reporting agency in the Capital Area. Because it is hard to compare the number of arrests and clearances across jurisdictions with differences in the number of crimes committed, arrest rates and clearance rates per crime are typically used for comparisons. In 2016, the CAPCOG region had a 16% arrest rate and a 20% clearance rate for all crimes. For violent crimes, the arrest and clearance rates were 43% and 49%, respectively.  For context, nationwide, total crime arrest and clearance rates are slightly higher, at 20% and 22%, respectively. National violent crime arrest and clearance rates are slightly lower than the rates in the Capital Area, at 41% and 46%.

Total Crime
Total crime is the sum total of all of the incidents of the 7 index crimes in the Crime in Texas Report. The figure below contains a table with information on the total number of crimes reported, the rate of crime per 100,000 residents in the jurisdiction, and the number and percent of crimes cleared and arrests made by law enforcement agencies. This table can be used to find information about total crime in any jurisdiction in the CAPCOG region and can be filtered by county to compare crime across the different jurisdictions in each county.

The figure also contains a map with dots that represent the number of crimes committed in the jurisdiction (dot size) and the jurisdiction’s crime rate (dot color). Users can filter which jurisdictions are represented on this map based on their population.

Lastly, the figure contains a second map, which, rather than examining jurisdictions, provides information on crime, arrest, and clearance for each county in the CAPCOG region. This map is color coded so that counties with the lowest crime rates are dark green, and the counties with the highest crime rates are dark red.

There are a few trends that emerge in the data above. First, urban areas tend to have higher crime rates.

• The 18 highest crime rates in the region and 19 of the 20 highest rates in the Capital Area were reported by city police departments.
• County sheriff’s departments, which tend to serve more rural populations, reported lower crime rates. Of the Capital Area’s 10 counties, 8 county sheriff’s departments reported crime rates that place them in the bottom 20 among all jurisdictions.
• The cities that make up the top 10 highest crime rates in the region are geographically dispersed. Seven of the 10 CAPCOG counties host a city with a crime rate in the region’s top 10.
  • Only Blanco County, Caldwell County (Lockhart is 11th), and Llano County (the City of Llano did not report) are without a city in the top 10.
• Of the 12 jurisdictions in the region with over 25,000 residents, 8 have a crime rate higher than the regions median crime rate of 1,314.8.
  • 3 of the 4 agencies with greater than 25,000 residents and a crime rate below the median rate are in Williamson County, these are the Leander PD, the Georgetown PD, and the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office. The Hays County Sheriff’s Office is the other agency in this group.
• Only 4 jurisdictions in the CAPCOG region contain over 100,000 residents. Of those, only the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office had a crime rate below 2,000 in 2016. The 2 cities, Round Rock and Austin, had higher crime rates than the 2 counties in that group.

Along with observations about reported crime, we can also make a few observations about arrest rates and crime rates:

• High arrest rates (arrests per crime) tend to be correlated with higher crime rates. 7 of the 10 agencies with the highest arrest rates have a crime rate greater than the median for the region.
• 8 of the 10 agencies with the lowest arrest rates have a crime rate below the median crime rate in the CAPCOG region. Half of these agencies made 0 arrests in 2016.
• No university police department in the region had an arrest rate above the regional median. On the other hand, 2 of the 3 school district police departments had arrest rates above this median.

 
With a little extra work, we can compare arrests and clearance rates for agencies based on the number of residents under their jurisdiction.    

• The optimal community size may be somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 residents, at least based on arrest and clearance rates. All jurisdictions within this population range reported an arrest rate, a clearance rate, or both that were above the regional median.
• Larger populations show a dip in clearance rates. Over 50% of jurisdictions with populations between 10,000 and 50,000 were above the regional median for arrest rate, but only a quarter of these jurisdictions are above the median clearance rate.
• Smaller communities make arrests and clear crimes at a lower rate. Of the 17 jurisdictions with between 1,000 and 5,000 residents in the Capital Area, only 7 have either an arrest rate or clearance rates above the region’s median rate.

More information can be taken from the above figure by using the filters and looking closer at the data.

Violent Crime
Violent crime, which is the subset of total crime where the victim is physically harmed, includes: murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. These crimes make up about 11% of all index crimes reported in 2016. As with total crime, the Austin PD (3,903) reported more violent crimes than the rest of region combined (2,831). The median violent crime rate for the region is 155.1, and the median arrest rate is 36% for violent crimes. The median clearance rate for violent crime by CAPCOG jurisdictions is 50%, more than double the median clearance rate for total crime. In order to compare violent crime across the different jurisdictions and counties in the Capital Area, the below figure was created. It is similar in structure to the figure above, but contains information on violent crime rather than total crime.

Notably:

• Of the 60 total agencies in the Capital Area, 7 agencies reported no violent crimes and 6 more agencies reported only one violent crime in 2016. 
• The Granite Shoals PD is the only agency with a jurisdiction of over 5,000 residents to report less than 10 violent crimes in 2016.
• Although the total number of violent crimes in small communities is low, the 10 highest violent crime rates in 2016 were from cities that had fewer than 10,000 residents. The Austin PD reported the 11th highest violent crime rate in the region.
• 9 of the 10 jurisdictions with populations between 5,000 and 10,000 residents had a violent crime rate greater than the median rate for the Capital Area.
• Violent crime rates for agencies reporting at least 10 violent crimes, range from 68.4 by the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office to 782.0 by the Schulenburg PD. Interestingly, Schulenburg is a city in Fayette County.

Next, we can take a look at some observations on violent crime arrest rates and clearance rates. One detail about the data – it is possible for arrest and clearance rates to exceed 100%. This occurs when arrests or clearances are made for crimes committed in a previous year or when multiple arrests are made in relation to a single crime.

• For violent crimes 6 agencies in the Capital Area made more arrests than were reported in their jurisdiction, and 2 agencies cleared more violent crimes than were reported.
• 7 of the 8 agencies serving jurisdictions with populations between 10,000 and 20,000 residents have a violent crime arrest rate greater than the median rate.

• Only 1 of the 4 agencies with a jurisdiction of 20,000 to 50,000 had a violent crime clearance rate greater than the median rate in 2016, the Kyle Police Department.
• In the Capital Area, 5 of the 6 campus police departments had a violent crime clearance rate above the median rate for jurisdictions in the region.  

More information can be taken from the above figure by using the filters and looking closer at the data.

Next Steps
The next step in looking at crime in the region for 2016 is to look each individual index crime and identify outliers and trends for each specific crime. If you would like to do this please visits the criminal justice resource page which contains figures similar to the ones in this blog for all 7 index crimes, as well as the two figures that appear hear, and one for property crime which is a subset of total crime for the crimes that do not involve an interaction between the victim and the offender. These crimes are burglary, larceny, and auto theft.

CAPCOG uses this data as part of the regional Criminal Justice Planning process. We continue to work to provide the data the region’s stakeholders need to make informed decisions about criminal justice in the region. We also hope that by posting this data, we’re helping to make information about crime in the region more accessible. To that end, let us know if these figures are helpful. Definitely let us know if there are ways we can make these graphics more helpful. And keep an eye out for future Data Points posts to examine regional crime trends further.