The Texarkana Texas Police Department took to their Facebook Page to dispute the findings in a recent report released by a private security company that puts Texarkana as the second most dangerous city in Texas.

The report from Home Security Shieldplaces Texarkana as number 2 on the list. According to them, the report is compiled from data taken from the most recent FBI Uniform Crime Report, and is not only using violent crime reports, but also property crimes, and total crimes reported. So it does not distinguish the difference, stating that "a crime is a crime".

Texarkana Texas Police posted this statement on their Facebook Page,

There was a report prepared by a security company going around yesterday that purports Texarkana to be the 2nd Most Dangerous City in Texas. We take exception to this assertion. While we all recognize that there is crime in Texarkana, it appears that the information in the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) has been manipulated to serve the purpose of the for-profit security company. If you were to look at the actual UCR data and used the same calculation formula as yesterday's report, you would find that there are several communities where the crime rate is significantly higher than Texarkana. Why were those excluded from this report and is that an indication that there has been an intentional effort to mislead consumers? That aside, there is a larger fundamental problem with using UCR data to compare the crime rate between cities based solely on populations. The UCR report itself warns against it, saying that any comparisons made would be "meaningless". With all the socio-economic, geographic, and legal differences between communities, it simply doesn't make sense to try to compare Texarkana to Dallas, Waco, Atlanta, Longview, or even Texarkana, Arkansas. The UCR is truly only good for showing crime trends within a particular community over a period of time - not for saying one city is safer than another. The question is, did this security company want to provide a community service by putting this together - or was it to raise the level of fear among the residents of those cities. Did they hope that more people would purchase an alarm system from them and increase their profits? We will let you answer that question for yourself. However, we believe it would be unconscionable for any company to use scare tactics to try to increase their profits. The following language from the Attorney General of Texas website is certainly something this company should carefully consider before it continues making such glaring misrepresentations: “When a vendor or salesman uses false statements, duress, exaggerations or misleading advertisements to win a Texan’s business, he or she violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA).”

Home Security Shield claims in their posting,

We realize that this topic is inherently controversial in nature and hits close to home. We are aware that there are many different ways to present this data, but when compiling this list we chose to consider not just murder rate, but both violent and property crimes.

The report also takes into account Total Crimes Reported, regardless of arrests or charges.

You can see what happens around the area, TXK Today started posting the Police Blotter back in June.

More From Eagle 106.3