Crime has been a consistent conversation in Columbia. In recent months, officials and community leaders have pointed to numbers from the Columbia Police Department’s (CPD) transparency dashboard. The tool, launched in August 2025, was designed to make crime data easier to access. But despite its growing role in shaping those discussions, confusion remains about how crimes are counted and what the dashboard’s numbers represent.
When looking at crime statistics, it’s helpful to know how crimes are counted. Some statistics count offenses, or the number of victims. These are crimes like assault or murder. But other statistics count the number of incidents, or times something occurred — regardless of how many people were affected. These are crimes such as robbery or vandalism.
This becomes important when understanding how crimes are counted in the Columbia Police Department’s transparency dashboard. CPD’s crime map and crime trends dashboard display incidents, or the total crimes alleged to have been committed. One incident can include multiple offenses, which can make crime maps and totals appear more alarming.
Mark Fitzgerald is the CPD Assistant Chief. He said the department chose to display incidents over offenses to give people the best understanding of crime in their neighborhood.
“It's very hard to tell from [showing offense] data whether or not that was one incident with eight offenses, or whether that's a terrible street to live on because last week, all these [crimes] occurred,” Fitzgerald said.
The dashboard shows crimes against persons in downtown Columbia were up two percent in 2025, as compared to 2024. But that change amounts to just two additional offenses.
Property crimes were down two percent from 2024 — that's three fewer crimes.
Columbia’s crime data is also shared with the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Fitzgerald said numbers on the state dashboard may be different from what is reported to the FBI due to differing crime definitions between Missouri and federal law.
“What might be under the state of Missouri statute as a burglary might not be what's counted as a burglary under the [federal] crime reporting,” Fitzgerald said.
CPD leaders plan to update the dashboard to show all victims in an incident to make the data easier to interpret. But understanding how to read the dashboard’s numbers goes beyond how crimes are classified.
Columbia compares its crime data to a set of benchmark cities with similar populations and characteristics. In addition to national benchmarks, CPD independently compares its crime data to in-state agencies like Springfield and Jefferson City.
One city on the national list is Fort Collins, Colorado, a city with a similar geographical area that is also home to a large public college, Colorado State University (CSU).
Jeffrey Nowacki is a CSU sociology professor who studies crime. He said trends are influenced by a range of factors, including weather, time of year, and the fact that most crime isn’t random — it most often occurs between people who know one another.
“By giving a little more context on offender-victim relationships, we [answer] some of these statements and questions using some of that data, while also recognizing some of the limitations that come with those data,” Nowacki said.
Some categories in Columbia stand out. Group B offenses, such as trespassing and liquor law violations, doubles from 2024 to 2025 and account for more than half of crimes downtown. But CPD said this partly due to increased enforcement of these crimes in the past year.
Police Chief Jill Schlude said increases in Group B offenses can indicate more arrests instead of more crime, since Group B offenses are only counted when someone is arrested.
“That's this idea of more enforcement [and] more officers in an area,” Schlude said. “A lot of these Group B offenses are going to go up, especially downtown, because you're talking about liquor law violations and all these other low hanging fruit.”
Schlude said the goal is interrupting violence before it escalates.
“The vast majority of the time, it's not someone calling in,” Schlude said. “It's ‘I interacted with you with you for some other reason — you were jaywalking, you had the open container, whatever it is — I ran you through the system and you have a warrant,’” Schlude said.
But researchers say the effectiveness of these tactics is still up for debate.
Ernesto Lopez is a senior research specialist with the Council on Criminal Justice. He said studies show mixed results from this kind of enforcement, especially as crime rates are declining across much of the country.
“You want to ensure that if you are claiming that this intervention works, there is some measurement that goes into it,” Lopez said. “Whether it's implementing the style of policing for one part of the city but not another and seeing if those trends are different over time.”
As CPD works to make its crime data more transparent, experts say residents should focus less on single numbers and more on long-term trends — and the context behind them — when judging what’s really happening in their community.
Editor's note: Elizabeth Lucas and Stan Jastrzebski contributed to this story.
