Just yesterday I was viewing crime statistics of the City of Richmond on Richmond Police Department’s website. Crime incident reports can be found here.

According to the site, “this Crime Incident Information system allows the public to query the Richmond Police Department’s database of founded crime.” Once a crime has been reported, the Police Department supposedly inputs the information about the crime into this database. Crimes are listed under a number of variables, such as location of the crime, demographics of the perpetrator and type of crime.

As I have been a direct victim of two crimes that have been reported to the police in the past year, I found it rather curious that the incident reports of these two crimes did not come up when I searched for the areas in which they occurred. I also found it very curious that the three homicides that occurred in Church Hill last month were also not part of the data that came up for the past year.

According to the Richmond Police Department statistics that are available to the public on their website, 37 homicides have occurred in the past year, none of which are those mentioned in the “Bloody Christmas” article.

Does anyone else find this rather curious? Is it possible that Richmond police may be attempting to skew their crime statistics to convince the public that there is less crime than there actually is in our city? Or are there just absent-minded people inputting the data? Either way, this is something that should be looked into more closely and addressed.

Megan Osborn
Richmond