A new crime statistics dashboard from the state Attorney General hit the ground running this week.
The Hawaiʻi Crime Dashboard displays data on reported crimes from each of the state’s four major counties between 2021 and 2024. It breaks down the total data into graphs, pie charts, and percentages that can be filtered based on year, offense type, and location.
Paul Perrone, the chief of research and statistics at the Department of the Attorney General, said the new system is a significant step-up from the data available previously, which was based on aggregate data without details or descriptions of individual crimes.
“This dashboard is a first of a few other programs that we’re going to transition away from old, hard copy report publications and more toward these online dashboards,” Perrone said.
“They allow users to query the data to find the things that they want, it allows the data to be updated much more regularly versus annually, so the launch of the dashboard represents the final major milestone in that.”
This is the final and biggest step in the decade-long transfer from the old Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system to the new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
Each reported crime will have upwards of 50 data elements available, such as characteristics of the crime, location, demographics of the offender and victims, and property values.
“The old system was really based upon monthly tallies of offenses like 82 motor vehicle thefts or 41 assaults, sort of thing,” he said.
“But now with NIBRS, all of this is new and requires a much bigger effort on both the police side, as well as our own, and nationally for the FBI as well, to provide this much deeper, richer data set.”
Perrone noted that the state began discussions with the four county police departments over 11 years ago to ensure each department was willing to make the transfer and was technologically stable to take on the new challenges.
He added that each department has undergone training to learn how to report crimes under the new NIBRS standards.
As 2025 comes to a close, he said he hopes to update the dashboard with this year’s data within the next year, but he wants to ensure no new information is entered into the system until every county has submitted its data.
“You're seeing charts and tables on these dashboards, and it isn't necessarily clear that one year isn't complete, or it only has six months of data, or it's missing the Maui Police Department, something of that nature,” he said.
“It gets really confusing and potentially quite misleading at that point, so we're trying to stick with complete annual data from all four police departments, and when we have those, we will update the dashboard.”
