Solvang police report small drop in major crimes, explain shift to new federal reporting system

Lieutenant Travis presented Solvang'025 crime statistics and explained the citytransition from the Uniform Crime Reporting system to the incident-based national reporting standard.

Travis said Solvang recorded "essentially five less serious crimes in 2025 compared to 2024," and noted calls for service declined about 3.2% (roughly 150 fewer calls) year-over-year. He repeatedly urged council members and the public to look at raw counts rather than percentages when totals are small.

The presentation focused on a technical change: the agency has moved from UCR to NIBRS (referred to in the presentation as NYERS/NIBRS), which captures all offenses in an incident rather than asking agencies to report only the single most serious offense. "What NIBRS does is we now report all of the crimes at the same time, even if there's more than one in an event," Travis said, adding that NIBRS tracks relationships between suspect and victim, firearm use, demographic data and other variables that will make the published annual report look different.

Council members asked whether the statistics covered Solvang city limits (Travis confirmed the numbers were city-specific and exclude California Highway Patrol internal incidents) and whether historical comparisons would be possible. Travis said staff had converted the final three months of 2025 back into UCR-style categories for the current presentation to provide an "apples-to-apples" view, but warned that future reports will show a larger set of Group A crimes under NIBRS and may not be directly comparable to earlier UCR-era summaries.

The department said it expects improved analytic capability once the new system is fully implemented and that an agency press release will explain changes to stakeholders and the public.

Council took no formal action on the statistics; the presentation closed after a question-and-answer period.