LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Kentucky State Police and its Louisville counterparts are at odds over the accuracy of crime data from the state's largest city, a dispute that extends beyond previously disagreed upon homicide figures.
At issue are numbers published in the 2022 "Crime in Kentucky" report released in July and touted by Gov. Andy Beshear as "promising news" in part because of a purported statewide drop in serious crime by more than 9% and a 33% decline in homicides.
WDRB News later found a discrepancy in the data: The report listed just 64 homicides submitted by the Louisville Metro Police Department, while city police officials said there were 164 last year. Adding 100 more homicides in Louisville alone would bring the statewide total to 531, still a decline of nearly 18% from the prior year.
But emails subsequently obtained under Kentucky's open records law reveal other differences that cast doubt on the complete set of figures attributed to Louisville police, as well as overall crime trends in the state, WDRB has found.
"None of the numbers KSP published in the Crime in KY book for 2022 is correct," Robin Oates, records management director for LMPD, wrote in an internal July 24 email. Oates wrote that KSP "are trying to figure out why the issue occurred."
Two days later, records show, Oates sent an email to Brandon Cobb of Kentucky State Police that included a spreadsheet of two sets of data. One, she wrote, is "what we reported to KSP for 2022." The other is the data published in the annual Crime in Kentucky report.
The numbers aren't even close. LMPD claims it reported a total of 61,417 serious offenses in 2022 but that state police published a figure of 44,125. That amounts to a difference of 17,292.
Moreover, the state report indicates that serious crime reported by LMPD dropped by more than 19%. But the numbers LMPD said it submitted would result in a 12% increase.
In her email, Oates asks Cobb to "advise what the next steps KSP will take to make sure these are reported correctly in the Crime in Kentucky book."
There were no return emails from state police from July 26 through Aug. 7, the date when WDRB asked LMPD for its email correspondence with the state agency. After weeks of emailed questions to both departments, the two agencies issued a statement describing the matter as a "mislabeled submission."
'Never been a disparity'
The Crime in Kentucky report is required by state law and published each year, showing "Group A" offenses reported by law enforcement agencies ranging from city police departments to units at state parks. It lists the most serious types of incidents, such as homicides, assaults, fraud and sex offenses.
The report lists 221,973 offenses for 2022, compared with 244,504 in 2021.
Factoring in the numbers LMPD said it submitted would change the overall tenor of the report, according to WDRB's analysis. Adjusting the statewide figures to account for the 17,292 difference would take the revised 2022 total number of offenses to 239,265.
In short, the new data would mean that crime declined in Kentucky by 2.1% from 2021 to 2022, not the 9.2% in the report.
State police, which falls under Beshear's administration, and Louisville police declined to be interviewed for this story. But Beshear, a Democrat running for reelection, told WDRB that "what we absolutely know is, even with the update, that serious crime decreased last year."
Beshear called the report a "living document that is updated."
"But in the end, if we get caught up on the fact that some of the numbers will and always do change, versus what we saw was a decrease — and it's important that we're honest to people about both what the numbers are and the trends we're seeing," he said.
Meanwhile, each agency has a different version of what happened.
LMPD spokesman Matt Sanders said the department sent crime data through November 2022 to state police in late December of that year, then sent monthly data for December and any updates in March 2023. That's in keeping with prior years' submissions done between February and April, he said in an email.
"There has never been a disparity in numbers in previous years," Sanders said. "We are unsure where the discrepancy resulted from after KSP published their report."
KSP maintains that data LMPD sent in January 2023 for the previous calendar year "was reflected accurately by KSP in the 2022 Crime in Kentucky report," spokesman Capt. Paul Blanton said.
He said the data LMPD sent in March "was not correctly labeled or timely for the purposes of inclusion in the Crime in Kentucky report."
State police said neither it nor LMPD was aware of the inaccuracies when the report was released July 19. It added that updated numbers from LMPD and other departments will be reflected in next year's report.
Blanton did not respond to a question asking what the deadline was for police agencies to submit data.
He said in an email that numbers from previous Crime in Kentucky reports fluctuate, citing an example of changes from the statewide reports published in 2020 and 2021. The 2020 report, for instance, initially listed 254,328 offenses but was revised in the following year's report to 256,145, an increase of 1,817.
WDRB reviewed the overall annual change from the last 10 yearly reports. We found that in seven of those years there was no adjustment of the initially reported figures. In the three cases in which numbers changed, the largest increase was the 1,817 Blanton cited.
He did not answer a question about whether a data adjustment as large as the LMPD discrepancy has been made from one year's report to the next.
After weeks of emailed questions to both departments, Blanton and LMPD spokeswoman Angela Ingram issued a joint statement on Sept. 13.
It said: "LMPD and KSP are now both aware of the mislabeled submission, and we continue to be committed to making sure all crime data is accurately reported in the Crime in Kentucky reports."
Kentucky State Police and its Louisville counterparts are at odds over the accuracy of crime data from the state’s largest city.
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