Hillsborough crime data shows complexity as prosecutor candidates see declines

The issue of crime is an age-old political bone of contention that is discussed again and again every election season.

In this year's race for Hillsborough district attorney, Democrat Andrew Warren has repeatedly attacked this issue as he campaigns to reclaim the office from which he was suspended in 2022. Warren specifically claims that crime fell during his tenure and has risen since.

“It is an undeniable fact that crime in Hillsborough County has dropped 32% in five years, making it the safest large county in Florida,” Warren told attendees at the Tiger Bay Club debate in May.

His Republican opponent Suzy Lopez says crime has declined under her leadership.

“Crime is down 15% in Hillsborough County year-to-date,” Lopez told the same group. “That's not my statistic. That's a statistic that comes from the sheriff. Last year, it was down 8% year-to-date.”

Publicly available crime statistics show that the crime situation in Hillsborough County is complicated. While overall crime has declined over the past decade, including the years Warren was in office, individual crime categories have fluctuated from year to year.

Changes in the way police departments analyze crime have made statewide crime data more difficult to access and study in recent years, but statistics obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show a continued downward trend.

Delve into the numbers

The number cited by Warren comes from the overall crime rate, which is the number of crimes per 100,000 residents. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement compiles the statewide figures based on statistics from individual law enforcement agencies.

If you compare the crime rate in Hillsborough County during his first year in office to the rate in 2020, you see a decrease of about 32%.

When you compare crime rates in surrounding counties for the same time period, the declines are even steeper. In Pinellas County, the crime rate fell by 41%. In Pasco, it fell by 35%. And in Polk County, it fell by 38%.

The overall crime rate in Hillsborough County had been declining for years before Warren took office, albeit at a somewhat slower rate. Between 2012 and his first year in office, the overall crime rate fell 27%, according to figures from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

A more differentiated picture emerges when comparing violent crime and property crime.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement statistics divide violent crimes into four main categories: murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery. Three additional categories are property crimes: burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft.

The violent crime rate fell by about 4% between the years Warren cited. That's a slower rate than the previous four years, when violent crime fell by nearly 12%.

And if you look at just the last two years of that period, the violent crime rate has increased by about 14%, largely in line with nationwide trends in a decidedly unusual year that saw the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a spike in unemployment and social unrest in response to the murder of George Floyd.

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All of these factors made 2020 a difficult year for crime researchers compared to the years before and after, says Chris Herrmann, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former crime analyst with the New York Police Department.

“The pandemic was like a perfect storm of all the health concerns and the tremendous loss of life and hospital and health care costs. Then you had housing insecurity, food insecurity, unemployment,” Herrmann said. “When you add all that together, it typically leads to more alcohol and illicit drug use, which in turn fuels all this crime.”

The number of property crimes was even more striking. In the period mentioned by Warren, the number of property crimes fell by 37 percent. In the four years before that, the decline was 26 percent.

A closer look at the individual crime categories reveals annual fluctuations.

For example, the total number of murders in Hillsborough County during the period cited by Warren was 60 annually, but rose to 81 in 2020.

This increase was also consistent with national trends during the pandemic.

Changes in the data

When the Times asked Warren about his claim that crime has increased over the past 18 months, he pointed to Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrest data that show an increase in the number of people police have taken into custody for various crimes. But researchers say that's not a good measure of crime.

“Arrest data can be a good indicator of police behavior and priorities, but not necessarily a good indicator of crime trends,” said Justin Nix, a professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Examining crime statistics from recent years is more difficult. That's because in 2021, the FBI decommissioned its century-old Uniform Crime Reporting System. The system the agency now uses is the National Incident-Based Reporting System, known as NIBRS. It's capable of capturing much more detailed information about crime. The problem is that not all law enforcement agencies use it, and not all of them make their statistics easily accessible.

In Hillsborough County, Tampa police reported crime statistics to the state through the new federal system from 2021 to 2023.

Their figures reflect a 13% drop in the city's violent crime rate.

At the same time, the city's property crime rate rose by almost 10% in the first year and fell by about 7% in the second. The reasons for the increase in property crime are unclear, but the data shows an increase in burglaries and various types of theft in 2022.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, the county's largest law enforcement agency, which also covers unincorporated areas, provided its own crime statistics at the Times' request. Its data consisted of raw crime figures, which are different from crime rates. But those numbers also showed declines.

Crimes against “persons,” which include murder, rape and grievous bodily harm, fell by about 7% in 2022.

According to the agency, they fell by a further 1 percent in 2023.

Property crimes fell 6% in 2022 and fell again by 14% the following year.

Looking at this year, the total number of all personal and property crimes through the end of July shows a decrease of about 14.5% compared to the same period last year, which is consistent with Lopez's claim of a 15% decrease.

Neither prosecutors nor Lopez's campaign responded to requests for comment for this article.

There was an increase in some individual crime categories. The sheriff's office counted 23 murders by the end of July 2023. By July of this year, there were 31.

Can a general decline in crime be attributed to a single person, such as the prosecutor?

“I'm typically skeptical that a particular politician or police chief makes a big difference in a city or county's crime rate, especially if the crime rate in that city or county follows national trends,” said Jeff Asher, a nationally recognized crime data analyst and co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics. “However, there are many cases where the policies implemented by a politician or police chief can be clearly linked to a change in crime trends.”

Herrmann, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, agreed that certain policies can affect crime trends, noting that the use of police resources tends to have more influence than what politicians do.

“I think politicians like to take everything they can,” says Herrmann, “and then they try to shift the blame onto others and apologize for the bad things.”

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