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COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO. -- It may seem like crime has been on the rise lately in Colorado Springs, but is it really?

According to the latest annual report from the Colorado Springs Police Department from 2009 to 2010 almost every type of crime rose.

But CSPD officials said you have to look at the big picture to get the whole story.

"When you look at the Uniform Crime Report that we put out, statistics we send to the FBI, in several crime categories we did see percentage increases in crime," Sgt. Darrin Abbink, CSPD Public Information Officer, said.

Abbink agreed that at first glance the numbers look shocking.

From 2009 to 2010 murder is up 33 percent, theft almost 17 percent and overall crimes 12.4 percent.

But Abbink added that the numbers can be misleading.

"When we look from year to year we can see some large percentage changes. Now that may be a difference of a couple hundred crimes. When we talk about motor vehicle thefts we may be going from 1,000 to 1,200 motor vehicle thefts a year," Abbink said.

He said it's the big picture that tells the real story, not one single yearly report.

"When we look back as a police department we like to look back at the long term, of what's been going on with crime in the city, and when we look back four, five, years what we see is that crime goes down one year, comes back the next. It may go down again a year and come back the next, it's all still within normal number range," Abbink said.

Abbink said the reports are helpful in pointing out places where more work may need to be done.

"Any percentage change that shows us an increase from last year, we're going to look at and go do we need to do some educational campaigns? Have we changed our tactics? Have we changed how we investigate? Is that what's affecting these numbers? We'll look at them and see did we do something right, did we do something wrong? How do we bring those numbers back into the negative category?" he said.

Abbink said despite the growth Colorado Springs has seen, over the past five years the crime rates have remained consistent.

"We hit the highs, we hit the lows, we stay in between those numbers. It's not to a point where we're at an unusual pattern for the city," Abbink said.

Abbink said they are also doing the same amount of work with fewer officers.

"We lost about 50 to 60 positions at the Police Department, just in the police officer positions alone, and of course that doesn't even include the civilian positions we've lost," Abbink said.

He said CSPD has had to change some of their tactics, but they are still getting the job done.

"We're just having to do it in a smarter way. We understand that the public is upset if we can't make it out when their car gets broken into and we ask them to report online or phone in the report, but the reality of the matter is that was a time consuming operation," he said.

Abbink said police are able to get the same information over the phone or online that they would have gathered in person.

"We still as a department get that information, we still send it through crime analysis. It does get looked at. It is still sent to the detective units to be looked it. We just have to tackle the problems, not on an individual basis, but as a pattern as a whole," he said.

While their new tactics may not be popular, Abbink said they are working.

"When we talk about robbery, burglary, cars getting broken into, those are crimes that are solved, and they always have been through looking at overall patterns," he said. "We continue to make the arrests, and our arrest percentages have stayed the same and those crimes have stayed within that same number even with these new forms of reporting we're asking the public to do."

The 2011 data hasn't been released yet but Abbink predicts the city's homicide rate will be on the high side.

"The other crimes that we've been looking at sexual assault, robbery, thefts, and larcenies, appear to be fairly flat, even declining a little bit over 2010 levels," he said.

Abbink said there are lot of things that affect crime rates and they can be hard to predict, but one thing that is certain: they are always fluctuating.

"Crime is transient, it moves. So our crimes may go down one year, somebody else's may go up. There's a transient nature to crime and that's a big part of what happens. Significant arrests can have a part in that and some of it is just the nature of crime. People get older, they don't commit as many crimes, younger people coming in," he said.

Abbink said compared to other cities similar in size, Colorado Springs is doing well.

"We actually remain on the low end of all the crimes whether it's property crime, sexual assault, robbery, homicides, we tend to run lower than most of those cities," he said.