The good news is that booming population growth in Lawrence and Douglas County hasn't brought skyrocketing crime rates.
The bad news on the crime-rate front is that Lawrence and Douglas County law enforcers are making slow progress in their reporting and analysis of area crime.
l Lawrence Police Department now has a Web site detailing crime statistics compiled by a department civilian employee. But after months of seeking a remedy, LPD still has computer problems that prevent it from passing its crime data along to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation or the FBI.
l Neither the Douglas County Sheriff's Office nor the Lawrence Police Department have a crime analyst.
"We're limited in what we can do with these," Sheriff Rick Trapp said last week, after his staff manually compiled crime and traffic accident statistics for the past two years. "We don't have the capability of analyzing it and we probably won't for some time."
l Many cities, including nearby Topeka, have police forces equipped to provide media and the public specific crime data, so that residents get a more complete and daily picture of what goes on in their neighborhoods.
But Lawrence police, despite some public clamor, aren't yet equipped to provide information that detailed.
Neighborhood groups are especially interested in not only crime statistics in their neighborhoods but also nuisance problems such as excessive noise and environmental problems, said Arly Allen, a member of the Centennial Neighborhood Assn.
So far there has been no easy way to track neighborhood crimes and their frequency, police say. Radio dispatch logs are used to determine types of calls for service to a particular address. But those calls are not always accurate because they don't always reflect the outcome of the call.
"We're not always able to analyze what's going on in our neighborhoods, and therefore we can't improve them," Allen said.
The police department now has a civilian employee who compiles detailed crime statistics. Those statistics can be found on the department's Internet Web page, http://www.lawrencepolice.org.
While the police have access to their own statistics, the department continues to have to deal with a computer software problem that hinders reporting those statistics to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, officials said. The police department also tries to send the sheriff's statistics to the KBI.
The department is studying how to fix the KBI reporting problem and how much the remedy will cost.
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