Most violent crimes in Atlanta go unreported to the police, according to a study conducted by Atlanta-based Grady Memorial Hospital and the CDC, published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Here are four things to know:
1. The research began after DeKalb County Police Sergeant David Fraser's department held a community meeting during the investigation of a string of eight robberies.
"When we walked away from that meeting, we had 15 more incidents we were never aware of," Mr. Fraser told ABC News.
2. Data from the Department of Justice indicates 52.6 percent of injury-causing violent crime goes unreported nationwide. Sgt. Fraser, realizing there could only be so many community meetings, looked into a new policing technique adopted by the United Kingdom called the Cardiff Model. The Cardiff Model asks patients admitted into hospitals for traumatic physical injury where and when the incident occured. The information is later reported to the police for crime mapping.
3. Sgt. Fraser and other members of the DeKalb police force met with the London police to learn how they could appropriate the Cardiff Model for the Atlanta metro area. The CDC, Grady Hospital and DeKalb County police then partnered a pilot version of the Cardiff Model with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
4. The study revealed about 83.2 percent of injury-causing crimes were unreported to the police in one Atlanta jurisdiction. About 93 percent of injury-causing crimes were unreported in another Atlanta jurisdiction.
"The secret sauce of this is not the hospital, it's not the police department, it's the community," Daniel Wu, MD, emergency room physician at Grady Memorial Hospital and co-author of the study, told ABC News.
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