Data glitches leave Tucson out of FBI report

Tucson Police Department data was not included in the FBI’s 2014 Uniform Crime Report published Monday due to “data exchange errors” between the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the FBI, DPS Director Col. Frank Milstead said in a letter to police Chief Roberto Villaseñor.

The FBI Uniform Crime Report began in the 1920s and now includes statistics from 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to the FBI website.

The primary purpose of the report is to help agencies manage their operations, but the report also is “one of the country’s leading social indicators” used by researchers, lawmakers, city planners and the news media.

TPD met all timelines and submission requirements as outlined by the DPS, Sgt. Kimberly Bay, a Tucson police spokeswoman, said Monday in a news release.

Bay referred questions about the “data exchange errors” to the DPS, which did not immediately respond to requests for information.

In a July 28 letter to Villaseñor, Milstead acknowledged TPD submitted the required data on time. However, errors in the data surfaced when DPS sent the data to the FBI.

“This is normal and in the past DPS and the FBI have worked together to resolve data integrity errors,” Milstead wrote.

“This is the first year the FBI has enforced their policy of not manually correcting electronically submitted data.”

Milstead apologized for the omission, saying DPS could have resolved the errors if the agency had used all available resources.

“When DPS management became aware of this error, every effort was made to work with the FBI to include this information in the report,” Milstead wrote. “Unfortunately, they had already gone to press. This incident is being investigated and will not occur again.”

The data from TPD is now available at the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but they are not included in the Uniform Crime Report publication, Milstead said. The data also are available in the 2014 Crime in Arizona report, which DPS publishes annually.

This was not the first data problems that involved TPD and the FBI report. From 2006 to 2012, the FBI report left categories for larceny and property crime blank for Tucson, with a notation stating:

“The FBI determined that the agency did not follow national Uniform Crime Reporting Program guidelines for reporting an offense.”

Other Arizona cities included in the 2013 FBI report that were left out of the 2014 report were Bisbee, Clifton, Cottonwood, Glendale, Goodyear, Huachuca City, Kearny, Marana, Maricopa, Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, Sedona, Show Low, Willcox, and Winslow.