The Tucson Police Department is defending its work after an article called Tucson the most dangerous city in Arizona.
24/7 Wall St.states Tucson's violent crime rate is nearly 425 incidents per 100,000 people and over the state's rate of 410 incidents.
"Articles and titles like that are really unfortunate... they really don't put the context and unfortunately, in this case, it is also inaccurate," said Tucson Police's Lieutenant John Strader.
The article states it uses data in the FBI's 2015 Uniform Crime Report or UCR, which Lieutenant Strader says has errors.
"Anytime you have the UCR reporting a couple things you need to consider," he said. "One it is voluntary so only certain agencies contribute to those statistics and two it is only based on reported crime. So it doesn't take in account how engaged the police departments are in their communities and how responsive they are to either different types of calls for service or encouraging interaction or reporting and obviously those are going to result in different numbers."
Lieutenant Strader says looking at cities that voluntary report crimes in Arizona, Tucson ranks 10th statewide and is nearly 25% below the national average with like-size cities.
"We are not one of the most dangerous cities, we are not a dangerous city overall for our community," he stressed. "Most of the crimes that occur in this community are not stranger based crimes."
The Tucson Police Department provides crime reports on its website. To check out crime reported in Tucson or in your neighborhood, click here.
