City fixes error causing hate crime dashboard to double yearly totals: memo

AUSTIN (KXAN) — An error in the city of Austin's hate crime dashboard provided incorrect yearly totals for over a week, before city staff fixed it this week, according to a city memo

Council Member Marc Duchen wrote about the issue July 22 on the city council's web forum, as KXAN previously reported.

"I have tried to rely on the We All Belong dashboard for understanding trends in hate crimes across Austin for some time now. I was excited the other day when I noticed that the data set had been updated after what seemed to be over a year without updates," Duchen wrote.

However, he added that a staffer on CM Zo Qadri's team alerted him to a potential issue with the dashboard.

"I reviewed the data found on the We All Belong dashboard and saw that totals don't appear to match up with the APD hate crime data set," he wrote.

The error was confirmed by Austin Communications Director Jessica King in a memo published Wednesday. Her memo also announced the error had been fixed.

"A recent update to the system, which automatically pulls the raw APD hate crime data into the dashboard, resulted in a coding error that caused the yearly totals to be counted twice," King wrote.

The dashboard was created in 2023 as part of the city's "We All Belong" campaign. King said that it was developed to help Austin residents understand hate crimes and how to report them.

King added in her memo that city staff will make further updates to the dashboard soon, including a field that tells viewers when the data was last updated.