Oakwood Police Chief Randall Moon said as soon as an online report was issued claiming Oakwood was one of the most dangerous cities in America, he started getting phone calls. Those numbers, he said, are way out of line, however.
Safewise, an online company that compares and reviews security companies, also produces an annual list of the 50 Most Dangerous Cities in America. For 2016, Oakwood in Hall County showed up at number four on the list.
The numbers are generated from FBI reports, but Moon said the numbers for Oakwood for 2016 were skewed by a computer glitch.
"We noticed back in the beginning of 2016 that there was an issue with our computers communicating with FBI computers that we use to report those crime stats," Moon said. "Numerous attempts were made to correct the problem."
Moon said they never did get to the bottom of what happened, but he knows the inflated numbers Safewise.com saw when calculating its rankings were incorrect.
"We had thought that [it] had been repaired, but what obviously has happened is that they started reporting in duplicates and in some months actually tripled the numbers they were reporting," Moon said.
For example, the number of aggravated assaults in Oakwood as reported by the FBI is 90; Moon said the department investigated 15 cases of aggravated assaults.
"They had us at 130 burglaries and we actually had only 25," Moon said.
He said citizens need only look at statistics from other years to see that the 2016 numbers are way off-base.
"If you'll look at the 2015 and the 2017 [numbers] and even back to 2014...it's very, very obvious that the numbers I'm putting out there are in line with the City of Oakwood and not what appears to be the City of Atlanta or a bigger metropolitan area," Moon said.
The Chief has issued an open letter to Oakwood citizens, which has been posted on the Oakwood Police Department Facebook page, to try to ease some anxiety over the reported numbers.
"We're the same city we were in 2015," Moon said. "We're a safe city. We don't have the crime rate that reflects these numbers that were reported and as I've said in my letter, we actually saw a decrease in 2017 and we're in line for a decrease in 2018."
