Last week, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation released its annual report on crime statistics, but authorities say the crime numbers reported for Greensboro are inaccurate, and reflect a higher rate of violent crime than actually occurred.
The report lists 19 murder victims in 2010 and 41 in 2011, but the actual number of murder victims in Greensboro is actually 17 in 2010 and 25 in 2011.
Ken Miller, Greensboro Police Chief said although the most glaring mistake is the overreporting of the number of murder victims, discrepancies in other categories also exist.
"Aggravated assaults appear to be higher, potentially upward to 180 more than are currently reported, so what we are doing now is conducting a full top to bottom audit of each offense report," said Miller.
The Greensboro Police Department found the mistakes after an internal review of its reporting procedures and believes the discrepancies may go back as far as 2004. Miller blames data input errors.
"We took the protocals for entering data from that system and we applied them to the new system in 2004, which is the system that we currently use. Those protocals would be incorrect for how we should be coding these," said Miller.
Miller added, "Therefore, we were not attributing victims to crime or crime to victims where we had multiple victims correctly."
Miller said the department is working to correct the issues, including revising training modules to ensure employees are properly trained to use and manage the reporting software.
The State Bureau of Investigation does not re-issue reports once they are published. Corrected crime data will be reflected in next year’s report and will be released and posted on the Greensboro Police Department’s website.
