“Run for mayor and set this town right.”
That’s the call to action from a Columbia Police Officers' Association (CPOA) Facebook post on Sept. 6. The post was the first in a series that called for residents to run against Columbia’s sitting mayor and city council.
According to CPOA’s post, violent crime is “skyrocketing.” However, the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s crime database shows the city’s violent crime rate hasn’t changed much compared to last year.
Don Weaver serves as the CPOA’s general counsel. He said the initial Facebook post was meant to highlight the increase in crime that Columbia officers believe they’re noticing.
“There's gangs shooting it out on our streets almost daily,” he said. “There are criminals who have become more emboldened. There are rapes and attempted rapes, even in broad daylight, robberies and murders.”
Mayor Barbara Buffaloe said she believes she's also noticed a slight uptick in violent crime in Columbia. But she also claimed CPD has a 100% clearance rate — meaning all cases have been closed through an arrest or exceptional circumstances like a victim’s refusal to cooperate. She said both numbers are key in understanding the full picture of crime in Columbia.
“That's why I go to the police chief and ask for more updated numbers, because even one incident can increase that percentage a lot,” she said.
But numbers from the Missouri State Highway Patrol contradict CPOA claims. KBIA compared Violent Crime data from the MSHP database against CPD’s internal data, focusing on four FBI-classified violent crimes: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and robbery.
The numbers show crime has not drastically increased. CPD logged just ten more violent crimes from January to September of this year. MSHP – which gets its data from local police agencies around the state – logged eight more.
Weaver said CPOA did not use data to inform its post.
“The message that CPOA wants to communicate is crime is too high,” he said. “Whether it's the same as last year or lower, according to different metrics, is irrelevant. It's too high.”
Year-over-year crime data shows violent crime in Columbia fell from 2021 to 2023, which means the 2024 data need more context: is this year an outlier or the start of an upward swing?
While the numbers show violent crime in 2024 is on par with previous years, there’s another issue: the numbers reported by different agencies tracking Columbia’s violent crime don’t match.
Since 2021, MSHP has logged more instances of aggravated assault and sexual assault in Columbia than the city’s own police department. And MSHP only logs data given to it by other agencies, meaning the information comes directly from CPD.
Lt. Eric Brown of the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Public Information Office said local agencies often have different statutes than the FBI’s definitions, meaning there is not, in his words, “a 1-1 correlation between the two.”
Kyle Ward, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Northern Colorado, said the change to a new federal database may contribute to differing numbers.
Instituted in 2022, the National Incident-Based Reporting System provides more details about crimes. Ward says some agencies haven’t been able to update their systems due to limited resources, though there’s no indication this is the case for CPD.
Ward did say Mayor Buffaloe’s claim of a 100% clearance rate is unlikely, in part because of the many factors involved.
“There are so many things that it's relying on related to police ability, how many detectives or law enforcement officers or patrol officers that they have at any given time and the mechanisms they have to see a case through,” he said.
Despite these discrepancies, CPOA has continued to make posts referring to increasing crime, including a news release on Oct. 17 in support of using cameras to track license plate numbers. Amid the criticism, CPD hired 8 new officers from the state’s training academy in October.
Buffaloe, who is up for re-election in the spring, says only that the city is working to remedy issues with officer retention and create proactive initiatives to address violent crime.