After an unusually violent summer in Lincoln — where 10 people were killed between late May and early October after there were zero homicides in the preceding six months — the public's safety has been scrutinized, with residents enveloped in a feeling summarized by the county's top prosecutor.
"On the whole, I think people feel less safe in the community. I think that's true," Lancaster County Attorney Pat Condon said, noting that his own personal sense of security hadn't been rattled this summer as he's "seen a lot of things" in three decades as a prosecutor.
That sentiment has been echoed across the country amid a midterm campaign cycle that has often featured Republican office seekers pinning their hopes, in part, on tough-on-crime messaging.
Among them are Rep. Mike Flood, who is seeking reelection to Congress in Nebraska's 1st District and who at a news conference Thursday offered cherry-picked crime statistics about increases in car thefts, arsons, weapons offenses and homicides while warning of the "growing issue of crime in this community."
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Lincoln Police officials have taken a different tone on the issue.
"I will tell you I feel very comfortable living in Lincoln," Chief Teresa Ewins said at an Oct. 4 news conference where she announced the arrests of a 15-year-old girl and her 16-year-old boyfriend in the death of the girl's father in a crime Ewins described as "disturbing" and "difficult to understand."
"I feel it is a very safe community," the police chief said.
The past five months have been undoubtedly deadly in Lincoln, which has witnessed more suspected killings since May 20 than were recorded in any full year dating back to 2016, when there were 11 such incidents, itself an outlier as the only other double-digit total in the past three decades.
But raw reports of violent crime in the city have been largely stagnant for three full decades, even as Lincoln's population has grown by about 100,000 residents.
As a result, Lincoln's violent crime rate — the number of violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents — has actually dropped substantially since the 1990s and early 2000s, a Journal Star analysis of 30 years of violent crime data shows.
Reports of violent crimes — which include homicides, aggravated assaults, robberies and sexual assaults — have fluctuated only mildly over the years in Lincoln, where there were have routinely been between 900 and 1,300 reports of such crimes each year since 1990.
In 1995 — Lincoln's most violent year in the past three decades by violent crime rate — there were 626 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents.
By last year, the city's violent crime rate had been nearly cut in half, down to 372 violent crimes reported per 100,000 residents, according to police data.
Lincoln's five most violent years in the past three decades all came between 1991 and 1996, according to violent crime rate metrics.
And even individual reports of violent crime have found new lows in the past decade, according to the data. There were fewer violent crimes reported in 2021 than there were in 18 of the 19 years between 1992 and 2010.
"There was a series of things that happened that were very high profile in the city," Assistant Police Chief Jason Stille told the Journal Star, referring to a stretch of violence in late May that kicked off Lincoln's deadly summer.Â
"And so I think those, in rapid succession, tend to bleed over into people's thought that the city is out of control and it's a very, very dangerous place to live. It absolutely is not."
Despite homicides, violent crime down in 2022
The decades-long decrease in violent crime has continued into 2022, despite the uptick in homicides that have, at times, come in unsettling succession.
Through the first nine months of the year, Lincoln Police fielded 724 reports of violent crime — a 13.1% decrease from 2021's year-to-date total and a 9.1% decrease from the five-year, year-to-date average dating back to 2017, according to department data.
Reports of aggravated assaults, robberies and sexual assaults — the three types of crime that account for approximately 99% of violent crimes committed in Lincoln — have all seen decreases in 2022 compared to the five-year, year-to-date average, according to the data.
The exception, of course, has been homicides.
"I think it's chance, more than anything," said Tom Casady, who served as Lincoln's police chief from 1994 to 2011 and was the city's public safety director until 2019.
"I don't think (the rise in homicides) is indicative of a trend. If it were a trend, you'd see it persisting over a longer period of time and you'd see it in other kinds of violent crime, like armed robberies and aggravated assaults. And I don't think there's been a rise of any note in other kinds of crime.
"Murder is a very rare crime. It doesn't happen very much. So you could have two or three events that suddenly skew the percentage increase hugely. It's just a statistical anomaly."
A change in reporting standards
Though the police department's own public data shows a decrease in violent crime reports from 2020 to 2021, from 1,292 reports in 2020 to 1,091 such incidents last year, .
After a shift in federal reporting standards that started in 2021, the FBI — which uses data sent from the police department to the Nebraska's Crime Commission and on to the federal government — tracked 1,236 incidents of violent crime in Lincoln last year, 145 more than LPD reports publicly.
The difference arises in how each entity tracks crime data, Stille said. In Lincoln, a car break-in that results in the theft of items from within the car is counted as as a single crime. But within FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System that tracks crime victims, the same incident would count as two separate crimes: a larceny and a vandalism.
The difference matters more in violent crime reports.
In Lincoln, the police department counts instances like May's shooting outside a downtown bar that injured three people as a single crime, Stille said.
Under the new national reporting standards, that shooting will count as three aggravated assaults, one for each of the victims.
What last year's NIBRS-reported data means historically is unclear, since neither the police department nor FBI had previously published data that tracked crimes per victim, rather than per case.
"It made us rethink how we've been reporting data for the last 50 years," said Officer Katie Flood, the department's former public information officer who now works in LPD's information support unit.Â
"I don't know which one's right," she added, referring to the deviating reporting standards. "Both are right."Â Â
Stille likened the change — and its impact on year-by-year comparisons — to historical shifts in Major League Baseball.
"As a society, we’ve changed the dimensions of the ball park, the seams on the baseball, the number of games in the season and have some players hopped up on steroids, (but we) still try to compare 2022 stats against those of 1960," he said in an email. "There are limitations we must acknowledge."
A 'concerning trend' in gun violence
One development that has prompted concern within the police department is a marked rise in weapons offenses in Lincoln, which increased by 26.9% in the first nine months of the year over 2021's year-to-date total, according to department data.
Through September this year, there were 320 weapons offenses reported in Lincoln — a 36.9% increase over the five-year, year-to-date average. The broad categorization includes crimes as serious as first-degree murder and as a minor as a concealed carry violation, Stille said.
Fatal and non-fatal shootings have also risen this year, though only moderately. Police fielded reports of 20 gun assaults in the first nine months of this year, according to department data.
There were 17 such assaults through September 2021, 12 in the first nine months of 2020 and 17 over the same timeframe in 2019, according to the data.
"That's a concerning trend," Stille acknowledged.
Police officials have repeatedly pointed to a purported increase in gun availability in news conferences throughout the summer, like in late September, when Ewins described the uptick in weapons violence as a societal shift.
"People's anger towards each other cannot always be about grabbing a firearm. That can't be the solution," Ewins said Sept. 26. "And so we need to make sure that we understand that throughout our community firearms are not the answer to an argument. Neither is picking up a knife.
"The availability of these guns is so important because we can actually stop that from happening," she added.
Gangs driving up numbers?
At the same news conference Sept. 26, Ewins also pointed to gangs as a driving force in local crime — an explanation the department had not publicly linked to any individual shooting or killing this year.
Police have flagged 13 violent crimes this year for suspected gang involvement, said Stille, who cautioned that "gang flags" are subjective as potential gang affiliations can be difficult to verify.
There were fewer reported gang-related incidents in the first nine months of 2022 than any year dating back to 2015, according to department data. And the 13 violent crimes linked to gangs this year represent a decrease from the five-year year-to-date average of 19.
Only one homicide has been definitively linked to gang violence since 2016, said Stille, who noted that the case remains unsolved, an apparent reference to the killing of Goa Dat, a 24-year-old Omaha man who died last November after he was shot in the neck on U.S. 77.
Stille acknowledged the mere existence of gangs in Lincoln — where police say there were 1,296 members of 35 distinct gangs as of Sept. 29 — could come as a surprise to residents, since the police department rarely connects specific crimes to gangs publicly.
"We're in a Catch-22," he said. "Because we'll name the (suspect) when we make an arrest, and sometimes we can get into motive, but what we don't want to do is give notoriety to some of these gangs. We're walking a sort of tightrope."