Clerical error and software confusion have been blamed for gross representations detailing the number of people booked into the Monroe County Jail in recent years.
Calling his statistics “staggering” before the Monroe County Council in April, jail commander Sam Crowe presented numbers that showed a 53 percent increase in jail bookings from 2016 to 2017.
The numbers were wrong. The increase is actually 8.7 percent.
The jail booking totals for 2016 were 4,498 (not 4,059) and 4,889 (not 6,224) for 2017.
Crowe said Thursday it had been overwhelming to think there had been a 50 percent increase in people booked into the county jail in a year’s time.
“We’re pretty bogged down, day to day. I do feel better that we didn’t have a 50 percent increase. I’m more comfortable with the 8 or 9. That I can accept. It was hard to accept that 50 percent,” he said.
What happened?
Crowe presented the jail’s 2017 annual report during a work session of the Monroe County Council on April 24. An article about the jail’s annual report, “Addiction blamed for rising jail population,” ran in The Herald-Times on Sunday, April 29.
The numbers didn’t look correct to Bloomington Police Chief Mike Diekhoff or to city staff members who analyze crime data.
“When they released those numbers, we looked at them and thought they were high,” Diekhoff said this week. So they checked by running their own “jail booking” reports in Spillman, the computer-aided 911 and records software used at Monroe County Central Dispatch to send officers, firefighters and paramedics to emergency calls.
Monroe County Central Dispatch has used the Spillman software since September 2014. The Monroe County Jail started using the software in January 2016.