WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah (ABC 4 News) - For month's Crimetracker reports have been exposing crime in cities and towns. But for some neighborhoods, those crimes have not been available to see.
ABC 4 went to West Valley City to get answers as to why crimes were not being reported.
Assault, murder, and a police standoff within a few days would give the impression a city is overwhelmed with crime and make residents nervous. But according to
crimereports.com, nothing seems to be happening in the city. The site can provide up-to-date information on crimes happening in every neighborhood, but for the past 30 days, there has been no sign of crime in West Valley.
Some citizens suspect a cover-up to improve city image.
But it turns out, despite suspicions, the city is not hiding it's crime statistics. In fact, they report every hour on the hour.
"Just like any other city of our size and our population, you know there's gonna be a lot going on," said city spokesman Aaron Crim. "We've got 125,000 people. We've got a large geographical area. Things happen."
So ABC4 tracked the problem back to crimereports.com itself.
Founder Greg Whisenant said they had recently gotten a new system to help regulate the site, about a month ago. "We work with the police department directly to pull data directly out of their systems."
The new system and the way West Valley City uploaded their data did not work together, so it appeared that no crimes were being reported from the city.
"It's really kind of a new effort that we've been undertaking and part of the system didn't work for a time and we're glad you brought it to our attention so it can get fixed quickly," said Whisenant.
Within just a few hours, the issue that had plagued West Valley City residents for over a month was resolved and West Valley is back on the map.
"Under this new data sharing paradigm, people are able to see the specific crimes that are happening and take action to protect themselves, their family and their property."
With the data now available, West Valley City has no more crime than any other city. And residents can also see their community is safer than even they had thought.
