2022 Jail Booking Summary, Part 2

ANALYSIS

BY LEN CABRERA

We recently published a jail booking log analysis comparing 2022 and 2021 but did not include a breakdown by booking type or law enforcement agency. We have also obtained data from Alachua County Sheriff’s Office (ASO) and Gainesville Police Department (GPD) to try to compare the numbers of reported crimes for 2022 and 2021.

Daily booking-in and booking-out logs are kept by the Alachua County Jail. Each entry in the booking log gives identity and demographic information about the suspect; lists the charges, the arresting agency, and the booking time; and specifies the booking type. About 90% of the jail’s bookings are either mittimus or warrant.

A mittimus booking typically means that a law enforcement officer makes an arrest during or shortly after the crime is committed and files an arrest report that documents the incident. (Most of the crime articles at Alachua Chronicle are written from mittimus reports, although some are written from sworn complaints.) A warrant is an arrest made by order of a judge, either for administrative violations (like failure to appear or violation of pre-trial release) or after sufficient evidence of a crime has been presented by law enforcement investigators, usually some time after the crime was committed because the suspect was not apprehended at the time of the incident.

The table below shows that the breakdown of bookings by type in 2022 and 2021 were very similar.

In each daily booking log, a single suspect could be listed multiple times under various arrest types. The table above is based on our summary of the booking logs, which combines all lines for a single suspect on a given day into a single line. For example, someone may be arrested on a mittimus charge and then also booked under an existing warrant. That would be two lines in the booking log, but our single-line summary would count it as a mittimus booking. This scenario occurred 260 times in 2022 and 264 times in 2021. We usually omit people re-booked at the jail after returning from work release or from a hospital because we captured their crimes in an earlier booking log.

Almost all warrants (99.5%) were served by Alachua County Sherriff’s deputies. The table below shows the breakdown of mittimus arrests by law enforcement agency for 2022 and 2021. The 2022 figures are shown in the pie chart at the top of the article.

Nearly 85% of all mittimus arrests in 2022 were made by either GPD or ASO, down from 87.5% in 2021. For both years, GPD made nearly half of all mittimus arrests. ASO, which is responsible for all unincorporated areas plus all cities without their own police force, had the next largest proportion of mittimus arrests.

As with the original booking log analysis, these figures are based on jail bookings, not reported crimes. They do not necessarily indicate the amount or distribution of crime in Alachua County.

Crime data

Obtaining actual crime data is not as simple or straightforward as obtaining arrest data, which we accumulate every day from the jail booking log. Different law enforcement agencies report with different systems and on different schedules. There was also a change in data reporting standards required by the FBI starting in 2020 that has not been fully implemented, so comparisons to previous years cannot be made.

ASO provides crime report data to City Protect, a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions. The system basically records all of the incidents created by ASO’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. Unfortunately, ASO reported from their records management system (RMS) in 2021 and switched to the CAD system in 2022, so we cannot compare figures from 2021 to 2022. The total number of reported incidents in 2022 was 234,629, compared to only 95,331 in 2021. ASO explained that each incident record in CAD does not necessarily require a report in RMS, thus there are more CAD incident records.

The table below shows the ASO incidents reported to City Protect, matched as closely as possible to the categories for crimes booked at the jail as reported in our jail booking log analysis. It’s important to note that arrests may be for incidents in previous years, and multiple people can be arrested for the same incident. Also, the bookings in the left column are for all agencies in the county, while the incidents in the right column are only the ones responded to by ASO.

Just because a CAD incident is recorded does not necessarily mean a crime was committed, and if there was a crime it does not indicate whether a suspect was found or arrested. The incidents reflect dispatch calls to ASO deputies. For example, there are 23,303 traffic stops in the file. That does not mean ASO issued 23,303 traffic citations. While the number seems huge, if you figure 24 hours per day for 365 days, that’s only 2.6 traffic stop incidents per hour.

Interesting CAD incidents that are not reflected in the table above include:

• Person shot (S35)… 86
• Person stabbed (S36)… 49
• Shots heard/fired (S45)… 1,032

In 2022, ASO dealt with 10,427 incidents responding to some type of disturbance. These include armed disturbances, civil disputes, domestic disturbances, physical fights, and verbal disturbances (i.e., all S22 codes, not including S22T, trespassing, which included another 5,354 incidents, as shown in the table above). That’s over 28 incidents per day in 2022.

The CAD figures above only show incidents handled by ASO. UFPD is the only other law enforcement agency in Alachua County that reports to City Protect, but their data is not included in the table above.

GPD claims to file its data with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, but the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) only shows 2 of 757 Florida law enforcement agencies in its 2021 data, and GPD is not one of them. There is no data for 2022. Data prior to 2021 is summary-based, not incident-based.

We reached out to GPD for incident-level data. The information they sent is essentially the same as they presented at the City’s General Policy Committee meeting on October 27, which only covers the first three quarters of 2022. The image below is copied from page 3 of GPD’s slides from that presentation.

Note that GPD did not include Burglary to Conveyance, Motorcycle Thefts, or Retail Theft in their grand total, so they showed a 1.06% decrease in crime rather than a 1.6% increase, which is what we calculate when we include that data. This also does not include other types of crimes like trespassing, DUI, hit-and-run incidents, drug trafficking, etc.

GPD did confirm that the total number of homicides in their jurisdiction for the full year was 10, compared to 9 in 2021.

GPD also sent us figures on firearms incidents (shootings and confiscations), but only for the first three quarters of 2022. To compare to previous years, we only show the data from January 1 to September 30 for each year in the tables below.

Through the third quarter of 2022, GPD reported a 25% increase in shots fired compared to the same period in 2021 (although it was about the same as 2020). The number of shooting incidents attributed to known gang activity was up 58%. The silver lining in this data is that injuries were down 29% despite the increase in shootings.

GPD also saw an increase of 22% in firearms sized through the first three quarters of 2022 compared to 2021. The October 27 presentation also showed an additional 114 non-firearm weapons seized (but there were no figures for 2021 for comparison).

Note that for the last two years, handguns comprised over 80% of all firearms seized by GPD. “Assault-style” (i.e., AR and AK) firearms were only 2.5% of weapons seized in the first three quarters of 2022.