Abilene was rated as the No. 3 city in the nation for forcible rapes in 2009 – but the numbers were skewed.

The Abilene Police Department accidentally over-reported when sending data to the FBI. Instead of counting only forcible rape, APD reported all sexual assaults.

Sgt. Craig Jordan said for an incident to qualify as forcible rape under the FBI’s criteria, the incident must be forcible, there must be a male suspect, a female victim, and there has to be actual sexual contact between them. Anything not meeting those criteria falls under a different category of sexual assault.

“If it was a statutory-type deal where there was a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old, even though that’s still a sexual assault, and we reported it, it doesn’t actually meet the FBI’s criteria of a forcible rape,” Sgt. Jordan said.

Sexual assault between two males, two females, or a female suspect and a male victim do not fit the FBI’s forcible rape criteria.

“So even though they are sexual assaults, they didn’t fit the FBI’s criteria for UCR standards,” Sgt. Jordan said.

UCR is uniform crime reporting, which the ACU Police Department does separately from the city of Abilene.

According to KTXS, there are two other factors attributing to the data mix-up: The clerk who handled UCR data previously retired and the detective who corrected and reviewed the data was reassigned.

ACU Chief of Police Jimmy Ellison said none of the sexual assaults reported by the City of Abilene occurred at ACU because the two departments report their crimes separately.

Ellison said as far as the ACU Police Department numbers, no sexual assaults occurred on the ACU campus at all.

Although the ACU Police Department has jurisdiction in the area adjunct to ACU, any crimes in the adjunct area will be counted in the numbers for the City of Abilene.

Correct statistics for forcible rapes in years past, according to the KTXS website: 2000 – 40
2001 – 66
2002 – 63
2003 – 68
2004 – 55
2005 – 76
2006 – 62
2007 – 90
2008 – 91
2010 – 67