Crime Stoppers crime tracker Harris County, Texas
Data shows that after troubling crime spikes in 2020 and 2021, this year crime is starting to plateau in Harris County.
HOUSTON — Crime trends in Houston have been front and center since a controversial sermon by Second Baptist Church pastor Ed Young in which he called Houston the most dangerous city in America.
The city has since responded by releasing crime data refuting the pastor’s claims.
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On Thursday, Crime Stoppers released a new website that it says has been in the works for months. It tracks the latest crime data in Harris County.
It’s called the Glenda Gordy Research Center.
“Our goal at Crime Stoppers was just to show exactly the numbers, not a narrative, not an opinion on this, just to show what’s going on in our county,” said Sydney Zuiker of Crime Stoppers of Houston.
It breaks down crimes into six main categories:
- Homicide
- Aggravated theft
- Aggravated Sexual Assault
- Aggravated Aggression
- Human trafficking
- Felon in possession of a weapon
Crime Stoppers used Harris County’s publicly available datasets and cross-referenced them with DPS records to get their numbers. The data makes one thing clear.
“We’re seeing it (the crime) leveling off. There’s no argument there,” Zuiker said. “We’re not seeing the spike we did at this time last year.”
So far in 2022, the number of homicides is 285. If the number stays below 473 over the next three months, Harris County could see its first drop in murders since 2018.
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“Month after month, these numbers will unfortunately continue to increase, but we see that crime is changing. The landscape has changed a bit,” Zuiker said.
The same goes for aggravated assault. So far this year there have been 3,046. If the totals remain below 5,497 in January, it will be the first drop in more than seven years.
Of note, Crime Stoppers said, are the human trafficking cases. This year’s totals have already topped 2021. And cases of felons in possession of a gun have doubled since 2018 and could still top 2021’s totals.
“We don’t know what might happen in the next few months,” Zuiker said.
The site also outlines who gets and doesn’t get bail and for how much and what happens to those cases as they move through the court system.
