Gov. Bill Lee gives details on the upcoming deployment of National Guard troops and other state and national resources to Memphis to combat crime.
- The City of Memphis and the Memphis Police Department have claimed a 25-year low in overall crime.
- Memphis police track crime by incidents, while the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation tracks individual offenses, leading to different statistics.
- Experts say these conflicting numbers can confuse the public, but using both sets of data may provide a more complete picture of crime.
The City of Memphis and Memphis Police Department have touted a 25-year low in crime in recent weeks.
The claim was met with skepticism from Memphians who have said the city has become increasingly unsafe since the turn of the century.
Both MPD and the city touted a 25-year low in overall crime -- a statistic which only included murder, aggravated assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft incidents -- as a big step forward in progress. The claim, however, is difficult to fact-check based on the City of Memphis' public safety dashboard, which only goes back to 2020 and does not allow year-to-date comparisons.
However, looking at a full year in comparison, the city's dashboard showed a 12% decrease in overall crime from 2023 to 2024. The dashboard includes the same offense categories as the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation uses. For that same time frame, TBI showed an 11% decrease.
Numbers from the city divert slightly from those used routinely by the FBI and TBI. Numbers from the FBI and TBI are often used by media outlets and politicians to compare cities with one another.
On a yearly basis, MPD reports between 8.5% and 6.2% fewer offenses than TBI.
Conflicting statistics muddle public crime conversation
Conflicting narratives about crime statistics from the same media outlets can add to the confusion among readers and watchers. Seeing a report one day saying overall crime is at a 25-year low and then another saying crime is down 11% creates a sense of whiplash, especially when the numbers are not explained properly.
Having two different statistics for crime can cause confusion. This confusion is amplified when the context and methodology for those numbers are not explained.
Chris Herrmann, an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former crime analyst supervisor for the New York City Police Department, said news outlets have the responsibility to explain the statistics.
"I think it's on (the news media) then to say, 'Hey, there are two sets of numbers.' If you can provide some kind of ample reasoning between the two, you can try to do that," Herrmann said.
Despite being different, both numbers are technically correct depictions of crime in Memphis. But they may provide a better picture of crime when used together.
The city tracks crimes through incidents. If, for example, five cars are broken into in a parking lot on the same day, MPD counts this as one crime incident. TBI tracks crimes through individual offenses, so the aforementioned scenario would result in five offenses.
In short, the city tracks instances of a crime occurring, and the TBI tracks crime based on victims.
Taken individually, the city's numbers deflate crime in Memphis, and TBI's numbers inflate it. But the city does not use incident-based reporting to intentionally deflate those crimes, according to MPD Deputy Chief Joe Oakley.
Oakley, who oversees MPD's real-time crime center and data tracking, said incident-based reporting provides a more actionable statistic for police.
"They're still investigated and, like that cluster of five auto burglaries, after we've caught the suspect, we're going to charge him for five counts of auto burglary," Oakley said. "Because let's say his prints were in all of them, or the M.O. is the same -- same day, time location, same M.O.--so he's still charged with five counts."
But, by keeping the statistics limited to one single incident, it allows MPD to more accurately track which areas are being targeted for specific crimes, he said. A dashboard with five independent offenses, similar to how TBI reports crime, can sway how police are deployed during daily statistic briefings.
Herrmann, however, described the decision not to report statistics in the same format as TBI and FBI do as strange.
"You're reporting less information or you're providing less information, and your numbers are considerably different from the norm or the standard, or the way that we've been doing this since 1929, when the (FBI uniform crime reporting program) came out," Herrmann said.
He also said using incident-based statistics makes it difficult to compare statistics to previous years, but it also provides less information.
"All they're doing is muddying the water," he said.
Pros and cons of incident-based reporting
Incident-based reporting, like how Memphis police track crime, has a pitfall when it comes to comparing crime between years, however. Because a single incident could include one victim or several victims, Herrmann said year-over-year comparisons are inconsistent.
Herrmann used the Mandalay Bay shooting in 2017 as an extreme example of this.
"If you're looking at incidents, it would be one incident. But, if you're looking at victims, there were 60 people killed and another 400-something shot. That’s a pretty big incident," he said.
MPD does track homicides based on victims.
Meanwhile, the frequency of crime occurring is impossible to track based on TBI statistics since multiple people could be victimized in a single act of crime.
This is how MPD and TBI statistics could complement one another. MPD's can show how frequently crime occurs, and TBI's show how many victims there were. Often those lines mimic one another, Oakley said. And they mostly do.
But the differences could indicate years when there were fewer victims per incident, and vice versa.
"I know that our incident-based [reporting] helps us focus on crime, where it's at and what we are going to do about it. I think that's the important thing here," Oakley said.
Despite being incident-based, all victims are recorded within an incident report. Those victims are then used by TBI to determine its crime numbers. In a sense, MPD looks at crime statistics to see what they need to do for prevention and to make arrests. TBI, meanwhile, measures the impact crime has on a community.
"It's unfortunate that people think that we're lying. We're not," Oakley said. "We're incident-based. Now, we have a quality assurance unit that goes through every report to ensure that it's accurate. And if it's not accurate, then it’s changed or it’s sent back to the bureau or precinct. 'Hey, this is not a vandalism; it’s a theft from motor vehicle.' So when that’s changed, it goes back to quality assurance and all of our data goes to TBI. Nobody touches it here. Then when TBI gets it, they report it to FBI and then they show victims."
That is not to say MPD doesn't have a victim focus, Oakley said. He emphasized that tracking crime the way they do is for administrative work and is how top brass determines where resources need to be moved. Individual officers and detectives still spend time talking to each victim, he said.
Herrmann did say NYPD uses incident-based reporting for shootings where there were no victims.
But, he said, if police record-keeping is done well, the incident-based reporting used by MPD can complement TBI’s numbers. The difficulty in that is that it requires reporting crimes that do not have victims.
For example, Herrmann said there could be a shooting without any injuries. To jointly use the numbers properly would require counting those as incidents; but he said taking those reports can be arduous for police.
"So then you run into the reporting problem," he said. "The police do a really crappy job, typically, of reporting things that are incidents without victims. 'Oh, nobody was hurt here? I'm not writing a report. I'm not going to waste my time.' There's a lot of time and energy that goes into writing a police report. So if I can avoid paperwork, I'm going to always avoid paperwork."