Fewer people called Houston police each year since 2023, a trend that experts say could have multiple causes and is worth keeping an eye on.
Slightly more than 1.1 million calls were made to HPD’s patrol divisions in 2023, a six-year high, according to internal data gathered through an open records request. But since then, the number of calls decreased to around 1.08 million in 2024 and was on pace to finish 7% lower than that in 2025, according to the internal data from June.
“There’s been some studies showing that people’s willingness to report minor crimes reflects confidence in police in a city,” said Jay Coons, an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University who retired as a captain at the Harris County Sheriff’s Office in 2018. “If you don’t know or like your police, you’re not going to report minor things. You think they’ll make it worse. But if you do have that relationship, then you’re more likely to report.”
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Without deeper study of what sort of calls are coming in to the patrol divisions, which beats are seeing the biggest declines and data that won’t be available for some time, it’s hard to say exactly why calls for service are down, Coons cautioned.
But the relationship between calls for service and overall crime numbers is an interesting one, he said.
Coons recalled comparisons made decades ago of crime rates in Philadelphia and New York City, with considerably more crimes reported in New York. But researchers found minor crimes constituted a significant portion of the difference between the two cities — a sign that crime might not really be worse in New York, but rather people trusted police more there.
With Houston police now calling ICE agents on people with outstanding administrative warrants, some immigration advocates have said they worry it might make some residents more reticent to call police to report crime.
That could play a factor in 2025’s decline, Coons said. But it wouldn’t explain why calls for service were already on the decline in 2024, the last year of President Joe Biden’s presidency.
I mean, one obvious possibility is that there are fewer reportable crimes occurring. The way we judge how many crimes are occurring is to a large extent determined by how many reports are made. (Homicide is the main exception to that, for the obvious reason that there’s a dead person involved.) There are other ways to approach the data that can offer concurrence or dissent to the thesis, but usually those sorts of studies occur later on, so whatever ancillary findings we’ll get we’ll have to wait for. In the meantime, I will once again say that we’d all be better off if HPD did a better job of publicizing its data about their solve rates for different types of crimes. I have to think one reason why someone may or may not choose to call the cops for something is their belief that the bad guy will get caught.
This is a real problem with Houston and the media. They tell us Houston is this dangerous city, and it’s not. Crime is down. The criminal court house is no where as busy as it was a few years ago. If the media reported the truth, then their “if it bleed it leads” way of reporting goes away. That also means they have to stop the false reporting that democratic judges are light on crime, or releasing criminals who go out to commit more crimes.
I really wish the Harris county Democratic party protected their judges from these lies.
HPD is infamous for lying to judges to procure no-knock warrants and cheating taxpayers out of millions of dollars in trumped up overtime. It wasn’t so long ago that reporting a rape to HPD was the effective equivalent of throwing all evidence of the crime in the trash and losing the trash can. It would not surprise me to learn Houstonians only call HPD as a last, desperate resort.
Because so many judges are letting people walk and people are recognizing it’s pointless to involve the authorities, the police have people in custody and DAs office refuses to press charges. And the are let go. Remember the machine guns found and the kids were allowed to walk down in southeast Harris County . That is also traceable by the numbers.
Booger, having people in custody does not automatically translate into a prosecutable case. I know the popular line of thought among the maggot crowd is local authorities never make mistakes and all crime is committed by those with the most melatonin in their skin but the fact remains they get it wrong all the time. Over half the cases local authorities claim to have solved get dismissed upon review of the evidence. That is not because judges are soft on crime or any particular DA lets them all go as so many of you tell us, it is because the sloppy work done investigating and time pressures cops face.
Too many of you demand that judges act like prosecutors in robes lest they be labeled as soft on crime, the willingness of local judges to be the punching bag scapegoats for daring to adhere to the principles of the Constitution is admirable. If only the maggot crowd held the same standard when one of your own gets caught red handed, at least then you wouldn’t be hypocrites but look how you worship the pedophile in chief felon.
My worry would be that some of the drop off in calls is from citizens who feel it is a waste of their time to call because the police are not going to answer the phone, respond to the scene in a timely way, or make any real effort to solve the crime or problem. I recently was the victim of a 6 p.m. smash and grab at a local restaurant which had video of their parking lot. The police responded in 30 minutes or so, but said they did not have a thumb drive, so could not make a copy of the video evidence, but if I would go buy a thumb drive and arrange for the restaurant to download it, they would return to pick it up. I jumped through the hoops, including multiple reminder calls regarding picking up the evidence, but am not convinced anyone ever looked at the video and made a sincere effort to investigate.