Incident listing explained

It is apparent from some of the comments posted on The Chief's Corner that many readers are checking in on the Lincoln Police Department's daily call summary posted on our public web site. I received on off-blog email this morning from a citizen with a question:

"Chief Casady:

When looking at the daily call summary online, it is always a 'Selected Listing of Recent Incidents.' What criteria does a call need to meet to be selected, or is it simply an officer discretion kind of thing?"

Upon reflection, I think this might be slightly confusing to others, so here's the detailed description that I emailed back in response. This might help people understand in more detail exactly what you are looking at.

"The table of dispatched events is complete: that is everything we sent police officers to on the day in question. These data come from the Dispatch Records created at the Emergency Communications Center whenever an officer is assigned to a event. These records are uploaded to our Records Management System every minute, and the table is created from there. The listing of selected Incident Reports comes from our Records Management System. Essentially, an Incident Report is the original one-page summary report of a crime.

Incident Reports are prepared by the assigned officer on all crimes, and a few non-criminal events--such as missing persons and certain disturbances. Since it is created after the fact, the Incident Report can be delayed--sometimes (with a supervisor's approval) even a day or more beyond the officer's tour of duty. Conversely, the dispatch record is near real-time, with just a delay of a couple of minutes as the data transfers. Note, however, that for the current day, we post a fresh html table of dispatches on the hour.

Only about one dispatch in three results in an Incident Report. Many cases are resolved on the spot without any reports required, others result in Accident Reports, Information Reports, or Additional Case Investigation Reports.

I believe that Forgery and sexual assault are the only ones held back entirely from the selected incident report listing (the former because of volume, the later to help protect the victim's privacy.) There are a few incident types for which we are not posting the summary comments field: missing persons, sex offense-other, and child abuse. In looking over comments, I felt that there was some highly personal material in the summary comments of both missing persons and child abuse incident reports. For the sex offense-other cases, there was often some pretty strong language that concerned me a little. While this isn't always the case, this listing has to be automated, and there wasn't any way to make these decisions on a case-by-case basis, so we just strip off the cases using the incident code.

Regards,

Tom Casady"