Data Sources
Throughout this report, data concerning numbers of crimes in Austin was taken from APD’s “Crime Reports” dataset, accessed through the City of Austin’s Open Data Portal (ODP) on July 30th, 2020. This dataset is updated weekly and records all incident reports filed by APD officers, including the time, date, location, and highest offense listed in the incident report.
This dataset differs from the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), the dataset APD uses to calculate and report monthly crime totals. The ODP Crime Reports dataset records individual incident reports, while the UCR counts all crimes, including individual crimes recorded within a single incident. For example, a situation where someone both attacked and killed an individual would be recorded as two crimes on the UCR (aggravated assault and homicide), whereas it would be recorded as one incident on the ODP Crime Reports dataset.
The ODP Crime Reports dataset lists the highest offense for each incident, meaning that homicide totals should be consistent between the two datasets (as there is no higher charge). Other numbers and rates may appear larger on the UCR dataset, since single incidents are counted as multiple crimes. This can artificially inflate the UCR’s given violent crime rate, as some incidents are counted multiple times depending upon the charges involved.
Additionally, the UCR datasets for Austin were not made publicly available for 2019. The definition of “violent crime” used in this report followed the official FBI definition, which defines violent crimes as homicide (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter), rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
Throughout this report, population estimates were taken from the Austin City Demographer, estimated for April 1st of each year.
In the first section of this report (“From 2019 to 2020”), only the periods 01/01/2019 to 06/30/2019 and 01/01/2020 to 06/30/2020 were analyzed, to enable a comparison between the two years.
In the second section (“Crime Rate and APD Budget, 2015 to 2019”), crime totals and rates were calculated from the full calendar year (01/01 through 12/31) for each of 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. APD budget data was taken from the City of Austin, and counted for the year the budget took effect. For example, the budget number used for 2015 was the APD budget for fiscal year 2015-16.
Links
Ongoing crime data from APD
UCR Reports
Violent Crime definition
APD Budget/expenditures
Austin Population Histories and Forecasts