Hillsborough crime data shows complexity as state attorney candidates claim declines (2024)

The topic of crime is an age-old political football that gets tossed around every election season.

In this year’s race for Hillsborough state attorney, it’s one that Democrat Andrew Warren has repeatedly hit as he campaigns to reclaim the office from which he was suspended in 2022. Specifically, Warren claims crime went down when he was in office, and that it has gone up since.

“It is an indisputable fact that crime went down 32% in Hillsborough County over 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 gone down under her leadership.

“Crime is down 15% in Hillsborough County year to date,” Lopez told the same crowd. “Not my statistic. That’s a statistic that came from the sheriff. Last year, it was down 8% year to date.”

Publicly available crime statistics show that Hillsborough County’s crime picture is complicated. While overall crime declined in the last decade, including the years Warren was in office, individual crime categories varied from year to year.

Changes to the way police agencies analyze crime make it tricky to access and examine countywide crime data in the most recent years, but statistics obtained by the Tampa Bay Times reflect a continued downward trend.

Diving into the numbers

The figure that Warren cites comes from the total crime rate, which is the number of crimes per 100,000 people. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement compiles the countywide numbers based on statistics provided by individual law enforcement agencies.

Compare Hillsborough County’s crime rate in his first year in office with the rate in 2020 and you do see a decline of about 32%.

If you compare the crime rates in surrounding counties for the same period, the declines were steeper. In Pinellas County, the crime rate dropped 41%. In Pasco, the rate dropped 35%. And in Polk County, it dropped 38%.

The total crime rate in Hillsborough County was already declining for years before Warren took office, albeit at a slightly lower rate. Between 2012 and his first year in office, the overall crime rate declined by 27%, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement numbers.

A more nuanced picture emerges when comparing violent crime versus property crime.

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

The violent crime rate dropped about 4% between the years cited by Warren. That’s a slower rate than the previous four years, which saw violent crime decline close to 12%.

And if you look just at just the last two years of that period, the violent crime rate increased about 14%. That’s largely consistent with nationwide trends in what was a decidedly unusual year that saw the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in unemployment and social unrest in response to the murder of George Floyd.

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All those factors made 2020 a messy year for crime researchers to study in comparison to the years before and after, said Chris Herrmann, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former crime analyst for the New York City Police Department.

“The pandemic was like a perfect storm of all the health concerns and the huge loss of life and hospitals and health care costs. Then you had housing insecurity, food insecurity, unemployment,” Herrmann said. “You add all that up and it typically leads to more alcohol and illegal drug consumption, which kind of spurs all that crime.”

The property crime rates were more striking. In the period cited by Warren, property crime fell 37%. The decline was 26% over the previous four years.

A closer examination of individual crime categories shows they vary from year to year.

For example, Hillsborough County’s total number of murders each year in the period cited by Warren were in the 60s, but spiked to 81 in 2020.

That spike also was consistent with national trends during the pandemic.

Changes in the data

When the Times asked Warren about his claim that crime has risen in the last 18 months, he pointed to Florida Department of Law Enforcement arrest data, which reflect a surge in people law enforcement has taken into custody for various offenses. But researchers say that is 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 criminology professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

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

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

Their numbers reflect a 13% decline in the city’s violent crime rate.

At the same time, the city’s property crime rate rose by close to 10% the first year then fell about 7% in the second. The reasons for the property crime spike are unclear, though the data shows increases in burglaries and various categories of larceny in 2022.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office, the county’s largest law enforcement agency, whose jurisdiction includes unincorporated areas, provided its own crime statistics in response to a request from the Times. Their data consisted of raw crime numbers, which is distinct from the crime rate. But those numbers also showed declines.

Crimes against “persons,” which include things like murder, rape and aggravated assault, went down about 7% in 2022.

They fell another 1% in 2023, according to the agency.

Property crimes declined 6% in 2022, then fell again by 14% the following year.

Looking at this year, the total numbers for all person and property crimes through the end of July show a decline of about 14.5% as compared to the same period last year, which is consistent with Lopez’s claim of a 15% decline.

The State Attorney’s Office and Lopez’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Some individual crime categories saw increases. The sheriff’s office counted 23 murders by the end of July 2023. Through July of this year, they’d had 31.

Can a broad reduction in crime be attributed to any one person, such as the state attorney?

“I’m usually a skeptic that a particular politician or law enforcement leader makes a huge difference in a city or county’s crime rates, especially when the crime rates in that city or county are mimicking national trends,” said Jeff Asher, a nationally recognized crime data analyst and co-founder of the AH Datalytics firm. “That said, there are plenty of times where policies implemented by a politician or police leader can be clearly tied to a changing crime trend.”

Herrmann, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor, agreed that specific policies can influence crime trends. He noted that the use of police resources tends to have more influence than things politicians do.

“I think politicians love to take credit for whatever they can,” Herrmann said, “and then they try to pin blame and kind of excuse themselves for the bad stuff.”

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