Whipple launched his re-election campaign with faulty crime stats. How did that happen?

Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple and the Wichita Police Department are scrambling to scrub inaccurate violent crime stats from the internet after a Wichita Eagle analysis found the department promoted junk data that Whipple used to boost his re-election campaign.

Whipple said he made an honest mistake based on an official source — the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer — and conversations with Wichita police data analysts, who he said assured him the crime stats provided to the FBI were accurate.

The Eagle first reported on the inaccuracies May 31. The bogus claims were removed from his campaign website on Monday. Police also removed a link to the inaccurate data from its web page this week and told The Eagle they’re working to fix the mistake.

Whipple claimed multiple times — in an on-camera public statement and in a campaign announcement news release — that violent crime had been “cut in half” during his term as mayor. His campaign website repeated the claim at least four times, once with an added flourish, saying the city’s violent crime was “sitting at the lowest point in over a decade.”

The message reached thousands of potential voters, with Wichita’s three major television news outlets repeating the talking point in their coverage of his campaign announcement.

It wasn’t true.

Violent crime actually spiked in Wichita during Whipple’s term, mirroring national trends in 2020 and 2021 — which saw the most homicides during a two-year stretch in Wichita’s recorded history, an Eagle analysis of previous reporting and five different datasets found. Some crime categories have slightly decreased each of the past two years but remain above pre-pandemic levels, according to data — which The Eagle found is incomplete — provided by the Wichita Police Department.

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer includes a line graph showing Wichita’s violent crime dropped to a new low in 2021. But a check of the underlying data shows it left out at least 24 killings, 275 rapes, 200 robberies and 2,400 aggravated assaults — more than half of all violent crimes for the year.

Wichita had 54 homicides in 2021. The police department’s crime stats page listed 43 classified as criminal homicides on the city’s web page, which is three fewer than the number reported by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. The FBI data shows only 22 criminal homicides for that year.

For rapes in 2021, the FBI showed 162, just over half of the 295 reported by the KBI and far less than the 423 rapes on the WPD web page. The FBI data showed 1,394 aggravated assaults while KBI data showed 3,518, compared with 2,877 listed by the WPD. For robberies, the number reported to the KBI was 367 but the FBI lists only 200 of them. The city’s web page said 465. All of the data originates from the Wichita Police Department.

After The Eagle asked which numbers should have been on the FBI database, the WPD provided a different set of numbers for 2021: 47 homicides, 438 rapes and 4,278 aggravated assaults — all higher than those reported in 2020. The department did not include robberies in the new set of data.

The Wichita Police Department can’t explain why fewer than half of Wichita’s 2021 violent crimes appear on the FBI database, which is based on WPD data, or why all of the datasets are different.

Lt. Aaron Moses, executive information officer for the department, said the Kansas Bureau of Investigation pulls data from the city’s records management system and then passes it along to the FBI.

Moses also suggested a transition to a new records management system — NicheRMS365 — may have contributed to the mix up. The City Council approved a contract with Niche in 2018 and it went live in April 2021.

“The deadline for the KBI is January 31,” Moses said. “The deadline for the FBI is March 31. Due to the RMS transition in 2021 KBI provided an extension to WPD until April 15.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Wichita police submitted incomplete data because of the switch to Niche. The transition to a new records-keeping system resulted in thousands of faulty and incomplete crash reports to the Kansas Department of Transportation in 2021 that severely under-counted the number of accidents in Wichita.

Moses confirmed that Whipple spoke to WPD crime analysts to review the FBI data. He did not directly answer whether the analysts told Whipple the data was accurate.

The Wichita Police Department initially refused to answer questions about the erroneous data, directing The Eagle to the KBI and the FBI. It took six days of questioning for the department to admit the FBI data for 2021 “appears inconsistent with our complete internal data.”

After further questions, the WPD removed its violent crime stats from its web page, re-ran the numbers for 2021 and provided stats to The Eagle for 2023. The department did not provide data for 2022. The numbers for 2023 appear to be incomplete, as they include only nine of the 11 homicide cases the department has opened this year, according to Eagle records, which it shared with the WPD.

“Thank you for providing that information,” Moses said in an email. “Case classifications can change based on a variety of different factors. Thanks again for bringing this to our attention.”

While reporting this story, The Eagle looked at five different sets of violent crime data for Wichita: the KBI’s annual crime index, the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, the WPD’s Crime Stats web page, the WPD’s Community Crime Map and new data the department pulled in response to questions.

All five show significantly different violent crime numbers for the past several years, with the largest discrepancies starting in 2020 and getting worse in 2021. KBI and FBI data is not yet available for 2022 and 2023.

The WPD removed its Crime Stats table from its web page after The Eagle asked about the differences. But it kept a link to its Community Crime Map, which provides more up-to-date crime stats by location but significantly under-counts violent crime in Wichita, data shows.

For instance, only 2,293 aggravated assaults in 2021 appear on the map compared to the 4,278 the department now says should have been reported to the FBI. The KBI data shows there were at least 3,518 that year. It is also missing some homicides, including the 2021 death of 17-year-old Cedric Lofton, a foster child who was killed by juvenile corrections employees at the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center.

Moses said the WPD counts the number of incidents while the KBI and FBI count the number of victims. Under that methodology, the WPD would count a quadruple murder as one homicide while the KBI and FBI would count it as four homicides. That difference does not explain the inconsistencies in data reviewed by The Eagle.

“After you pointed out the discrepancies in the data, we removed the information from the WPD website while we reviewed the information,” Moses said in the statement. “We are currently reviewing that data to ensure consistency.”

“The Wichita Police Department is committed to accuracy and transparency,” Moses said. “We are reviewing our internal processes and engaging our LEO partners to ensure the most accurate and consistent data is available to the public.”

Smart policing?

Whipple has had a complicated relationship with the police department.

He took office as the darling of the Fraternal Order of Police, which has since called on him to resign.

During the 2019 campaign, he got a surprising endorsement from the FOP, which had not endorsed a mayoral candidate since 2003, after he promised to approve spending to hire more officers.

For his inauguration, the FOP donated $2,500 to Wichita’s Future PAC, a political action committee established by Chelsea Whipple, the mayor’s wife who is also his campaign treasurer. The PAC accepted donations as part of his inaugural gala in 2020.

Whipple made good on his promise to push for more spending for the department and raises for officers.

Whipple voted to increase the police budget each year he has been in office, raising police spending by nearly 25% — or $22.6 million — since 2019. By 2021, 137 police officers made more than $100,000 a year, including 117 sergeants, lieutenants and detectives. Last year, Whipple voted to bump up the starting salary for police recruits to $24 an hour.

In turn, the WPD had more officers on the street during Whipple’s term than at any time in the city’s history, growing from 634 the year before he took office to a record high 681 in 2021.

But the increases to spending and staffing have not translated to lower violent crime rates. The city’s 2021 high-water mark for police staffing was also one of the most violent years in Wichita’s history, with near-record numbers of aggravated assaults, rapes and murders.

“Do more officers equal less crime? It’s more complicated than that,” Whipple said. “It’s about being smart on crime, rebuilding public trust and taking advantage of relationships developed between the city, our officers and the public. That’s what has been shown to cut crime, and that’s what I’m focused on.”

Whipple’s relationship with the police union soured after he began criticizing the department’s handling of officer discipline and threatened to file a complaint against an officer who blocked him from using the wrong entrance at a neighborhood cleanup event, an incident for which he was found to be in violation of the city council’s ethics code.

Whipple saw his re-election launch as an opportunity to “celebrate the success of our WPD.”

“What I was trying to do was show that policy is headed in the right direction, and we have to have data that we can depend on,” Whipple said. “I cited my source and was told that there were no issues with reporting to the FBI by our WPD, and therefore I drew the conclusion based on numbers.”

Whipple said the fact that crime spiked during the first half of his term does not show that city policy is headed in the wrong direction.

Wichita hired a new police chief in 2022. It is working to implement recommendations to improve department culture after the city hired Jensen Hughes, a top national consultant, in response to an Eagle investigation that found a pattern of racism, sexism, homophobia and attitudes celebrating violence against civilians in text messages between SWAT team members.

The Jensen Hughes report criticized the city’s contract with the FOP, which Whipple voted in favor of in 2021, in part because of its pay structure. It grants officers a “conduct bonus” of $4,160 on average for not violating city policies — at a cost of $2.7 million to taxpayers. It also allows officers to trade conduct pay to avoid suspensions and discipline.

Whipple said he’s in favor of making changes outlined in the Jensen Hughes report.

As far as the crime stats go, Whipple said he does worry that the incorrect stats he cited could hurt the public trust, which is why he removed the claim from his website and has vowed not to repeat the mistake.

The campaign gaffe has resulted in the WPD taking a second look at its crime stats and how it reports them to outside agencies and the public.

“I actually think the situation is positive because it shows a flaw in the data that was reported to the FBI,” Whipple said. “My silver lining on this is now the data that’s wrong can be corrected so that Wichita is more accurately presented.”

“I am very surprised this was not accurate,” Whipple said. “I had no reason to question it, I guess, in this situation. I wanted to use the same data that compares cities across the country.”

Whipple said he was aware that other crime stats published by the KBI and the WPD showed higher violent crime in 2021 but chose to cite the FBI data because “it’s a published, third-party standard that clearly shows statistical trends, commonly used for analysis when compared to other cities and states.”

“As mayor, I cite my sources,” Whipple said. “I’m always concerned when something comes out that’s inaccurate, but I would push back on you. It wasn’t a ‘claim,’ it was a reading of the FBI’s database, which for nine out of 10 years that I went back was accurate, so I was reading the data that was available.

“I appreciate that this inquiry has resulted in a better understanding of what’s being published right now, and will lead to a correction of that,” Whipple said. “That is more important to me than any talking point or anything that could be interpreted as political.”