Why doesn’t the Austin Police Department publish yearly reports on the crimes it solves?

People have opinions on policing, but there’s one unifying constant in discussions around the practice: Crimes are bad, and they should be solved.

To measure that efficacy, departments across the country use clearance rates, an imperfect metric but one that is crucial in determining a department’s impact.

But, for years, the Austin Police Department hasn’t published data on the crimes it’s cleared.

Every other city in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities does provide this data in some form, but at No. 11, Austin does not.

After KUT News asked the police department why they haven’t shared those numbers publicly, APD said it will begin publicizing those numbers.

So what are clearance rates, and why do they matter? Let’s take a look.

What’s a clearance rate?

The simple answer: It’s the number of crimes solved in a given year. If you want an easy way to calculate it, divide the number of crimes solved by the number of crimes reported.

The total count of crimes includes everything from murder to graffiti to assault to larceny (otherwise known as theft).

They’re broken down into three major categories:

• crimes against people
• crimes against property
• crimes against society

Any given crime is solved – marked as “cleared” – or it’s unsolved. Dubbing a crime cleared can mean a department has caught the person responsible or that it has done all in its power to do so.

For example, say someone has their car stolen. Police are called. They show up. They talk to a witness. That witness says, “I know exactly who stole my car, but don’t wanna testify in court.” That could qualify as a case that’s cleared with exception, meaning police did all they could to solve a crime. The same is true if a prosecutor doesn’t want to take a case after evidence is presented to them.

For more than a decade, APD provided reports of all crimes in its annual crime and traffic report. In 2021, when Austin saw more murders than it had in decades, the department stopped publishing those reports.

Since then, the clearance rates have not been made available to the city in any public-facing way. In order to understand how APD is doing, KUT News conducted an analysis of the data submitted by the police department to the Texas Department of Public Safety and found those numbers have been steadily improving since a spike in crime just after the pandemic. More robberies, assaults, sexual assaults and murders were solved in 2023 than the previous year.

 

Compared to the rest of the country, Austin has had a pretty average clearance rate. As with most departments, APD has struggled to solve things like larceny and car thefts, which have bogged down its overall average clearance rate. Its murder clearances – roughly 85 percent over the last five years – are significantly above the national average of around 53 percent.

The Texas Department of Public Safety compiles a yearly crime report based on what it receives from APD. The numbers are also submitted to the FBI, as the department is legally required to do. But those numbers sit on a shelf: The department doesn’t provide updates to City Council or other city commissions on how many crimes are solved in a given year.

Why isn’t APD publishing its clearance rates?

There have been a lot of understandable headwinds facing the department that could’ve contributed to this lack of data.

Austin police are understaffed, overworked and, they’d argue, underpaid. That’s been the case for years among officers, but those staffing shortages haven’t been as drastic among civilian employees who compile and publish this data.

APD has also had three police chiefs in as many years. Former interim Chief Joe Chacon signed off on the 2021 crime report, which published in April 2023, before he left the department. After that, Robin Henderson took over the helm, then she retired earlier this summer. Now, soon-to-be-permanent Chief Lisa Davis will formally take over the department after an expected swearing-in this month.

On top of that, the department’s former data chief, Jonathan Kringen, has been on administrative leave after a domestic violence arrest last year.

Looming over all of this is the fundamental shift in how police data has been organized on a national level. The FBI transitioned its data hub in 2021, requiring departments to retool how they submit violent and nonviolent crimes every year. That’s caused gaps in data at some departments, though APD committed to the new data-submission protocols in 2019 – well before its formal, national rollout.

Auzzie Krobatsch, police data initiatives and analytics officer, says that switch “muddied” APD’s data operations so much that the 2019 report on clearance rates was finished just last year.

Krobatsch says APD leaned on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s data collection and “de-emphasized” the more granular local data reporting over the last few years. She said the department is looking into publishing its own clearance rate data analysis, but that it’s “trying to be purposeful” about next steps.

Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a UT Austin professor and member of the city’s Public Safety Commission, has been calling on APD to release clearance rates for years. He says a bit of a lag in data is understandable, but the yearslong gap shows a “broader pattern” of APD doing “just enough work to say they did something.”

“I completely understand that there are data issues and that we’re not going to get a perfect measurement, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and the necessary,” he said. “We have no estimate of clearance rates, which is ridiculous. It’s an absurd fact about us that there is just no clearance rate for even homicide.”

Krobatsch told KUT last Thursday that the department is changing that, and that her team met to discuss how to report clearance rates and “doing that reporting proactively.”

Why does this matter?

How do we measure the effectiveness of a police force?

For decades, it’s been clearance rates.

Jeff Asher, a criminal justice data analyst with AH Analytics, says they’re a crucial barometer for how departments do what they’re supposed to do: solve crimes. But they’re also a good barometer for how they prioritize enforcement – and allocate resources, Asher says.

There are plenty of reasons clearance rates can go up or down. Staffing could go down, which makes it harder to solve cases. Response times could go up, which could leave police with fewer witnesses to contact. Fewer witnesses often make it harder to solve a crime.

But Asher says, most importantly, clearance rates serve as an effective, if not egg-headed, crime deterrent. On paper, they’re just numbers, but if those numbers show a department’s particular effectiveness at solving, say, a sexual assault or homicide or theft, it has a chilling effect on residents: They won’t do crime if they think they’ll get caught, research says.

“The research is clear that the biggest determinant that you can have to prevent people, or to convince people, not to commit crime is the swiftness or certainty of getting caught,” he says.

Publicizing those numbers, as Asher does exhaustively on his site, is key. Police won’t have that sense of deterrence if they don’t publicize how well they’re doing. Asher says that’s proven more effective than the simpler, more traditional tack of raising penalties for crimes – a more expensive prospect.

“Making sure that people understand that they’re going to get caught is the way to deter crime,” he said. “Adding penalties, especially when you’re solving (only) 5 percent of auto thefts or (only) 5 percent of vehicle burglaries, … doesn’t necessarily have an effect on people’s behaviors.”

Sierra-Arévalo says the publication of these numbers is crucial because of the department’s past. In 2019, state auditors found APD was arbitrarily clearing sexual assault cases without exhausting leads in 2017.

In 2022, the city settled a raft of lawsuits surrounding those cases, paying out $1 million to plaintiffs. APD formally apologized to survivors earlier this year.

As for the department’s present, Sierra-Arévalo argues the city already does some pretty granular data collection on policing. Last year, APD launched a dashboard that regularly updates the number of calls on violent and nonviolent crimes, along with staffing levels.

“Other places seem to have figured out how to report something when it comes to what would arguably be one of the most important metrics for a police department,” he said. “They even have a fancy new data portal to do that, and, seemingly, they have chosen not to.”

In the future, Sierra-Arévalo said he hopes the department provides more consistent yearly updates on crime through the Crime and Traffic Report and provides City Council and the Public Safety Commission with updates on clearance rates. He says if cities like Houston and Dallas can provide regular updates on cleared cases, Austin should, too.

“If you’re not reporting that metric, how is the public supposed to A) assess your ability to fulfill that mandate or B) hold you accountable for your failure to do so?”

What’s next?

Krobatsch says she and the department recognize the importance of sharing clearance rates with the public – the same way it does a whole litany of other police-related data points.

She says the department is welcoming feedback, “that clearance rates are important” and that the department will need time to get a system in place.

“We appreciate hearing the candid, constructive criticism that clearance rates are extremely important. We just ask your patience that you give us time to do it … because this is an important statistic,” she said. “If we’re not giving the community what they need, then that’s a disservice.”

This story was produced as part of the Austin Monitor’s reporting partnership with KUT.

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