Stephen F. Austin State University

Preliminary FBI statistics released Monday suggest San Antonio was consumed by a crime wave that managed to skip most large U.S. cities last year, experiencing increases in most crime categories, from aggravated assaults to robberies to burglaries.

But police and city leaders said the numbers may be the result of the San Antonio Police Department over-reporting crime to a flawed system that the FBI maintains.

“I don’t want to sound defensive here,” Police Chief William McManus said, “but it doesn’t feel like we have a major crime problem. Most of the people in the community are telling me that we’re doing a good job.”

An analysis of the FBI’s preliminary Crime in the United States report shows that San Antonio had the highest increase in violent crime of major cities — 32 percent — when most saw decreases for the second year in a row. Overall, U.S. crime fell 2.5 percent in 2008, compared with the year before. In San Antonio, total crime increased 17 percent.

However, the report shows the city experienced a decline in homicides, which criminologists say is one of the most solid indicators of how dangerous a city is because there is little room for interpretation of what constitutes the crime. There were six fewer homicides in 2008 than in 2007.

San Antonio also experienced a significant drop in rapes, with 33 percent fewer being reported than in 2007. It’s a statistic that a local rape crisis administrator said also was reflected in her own reports.

But with the large drop in one crime category came a huge increase in another. The FBI report showed San Antonio had one of the largest jumps in aggravated assaults in the country: a 56 percent increase in 2008.

The police chief was unable to explain why there were such drastic changes in those two categories. McManus said varied reasons could have contributed, including a change in the way the Police Department reported statistics to the FBI for the Uniform Crime Report. The department might have included more crimes in response to an audit last year that found it misclassified some reports for the UCR process, McManus said.

“Some of those might be simple assaults that we’re now counting as aggravated,” he said of the increase in aggravated assault cases.

City Manager Sheryl Sculley said the numbers also might be skewed because SAPD had a one-month backlog of crime reports for 2007 that ended up in the 2008 data.

James A. Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, is among many in his field who caution against putting too much emphasis on the FBI’s UCR reporting to compare cities. Experts warn that the statistics are notoriously fraught with problems because each law enforcement agency reports them differently.

“San Antonio could be getting a bad rap because it is being more diligent in its reporting,” said George R. Franks, criminal justice professor at Stephen F. Austin State University. “I would be more cautious of the cities that underreport crimes when everyone is fearful of crime.”

The FBI report was released on Mayor Julián Castro’s first day in office. Crime was not a major election issue, but the new mayor has been talking about it recently while meeting with police officers and vowing that San Antonio will be the “country’s safest big city.”

“It’s a top priority in this tough budget year,” Castro said Monday. “We’re going to try to move mountains” to hire more police officers.

San Antonio, a city of 1.3 million, has 1.57 officers per 1,000 residents. Most large-city departments have about 2.7 officers per 1,000 residents.

Though the city hired 234 officers in the past three years, it is not enough to meet the city’s needs, said Mike Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association.

“Our calls for service have gone up 24 percent since 1994, but we don’t have the officers to keep up with growth,” Helle said.

Sculley also said she thought the city needed to add more officers.

“And we need to focus our energies in areas where we have major problems,” she said, adding that property crimes was among them.

The Police Department hopes to better control its crime statistics by hiring nine civilian employees who will be given the task of reporting crimes to the FBI. Just one person currently keeps track of the statistics.

“It’s unfortunate that police have to spend a ton of money on civilian employees to produce results we don’t even want to compare,” said Franks, the criminologist. “Money is better utilized doing crime prevention and intervention.”