The Caswell Reporting Gap

01The short version

This started with a rumor that our schools have a drug overdose problem. That exact claim cannot be checked, because nobody in North Carolina counts overdoses in schools. The only number the state keeps is how many times a school gave someone Narcan: 26 times in the whole state last year, out of 1.5 million students.

Checking the rumor turned up something bigger.

02We report almost no crime

Caswell has reported the lowest crime rate in North Carolina four years in a row — 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Two things people ask first

"Did they just not send the paperwork in?" No. The Sheriff's Office filed all twelve months, every year. The state marks counties that miss months. Caswell has no mark. The paperwork went in. It is what is on the paperwork that does not add up.

"Isn't there another police department?" No. The Caswell County Sheriff's Office is the only law enforcement agency in the county. There are no town police. So the county's number is the Sheriff's number.

03But our courts stay busy

The state prison system keeps its own count — how many people from each county get convicted and sent to prison or put on probation. That comes from the courts, not from the Sheriff. It is a completely separate set of books.

Put the two side by side

Take every county. Compare how much crime it reports against how many of its people the courts convict. In a normal county those two line up — the score comes out around 1.

The fairest comparison of all

Caswell and Rockingham are in the same court district — District 17A. Same District Attorney. Same rules about who gets charged and who gets let go. This is as close to apples-to-apples as it gets:

Rockingham convicts twice as many people per head. But it reports five and a half times the crime. If Caswell were simply a quieter county, both numbers would move together. Only one of them did.

And our convictions did not drop. Caswell went from 311 people in prison or on probation in 2021-22 to 329 in 2023-24 — slightly up. Straight through the years we reported the least crime in the state, the courts kept convicting Caswell people at the same steady pace.

04The overdose numbers say the same thing

Deaths — this number is solid

Overdose deaths come from the medical examiner and the death certificate. A Caswell resident is counted as a Caswell death no matter which hospital or which state they die in. Nothing about the Sheriff or the schools touches this number.

Caswell has run above the state average three years running, at roughly double Alamance — a county with 183,000 people to our 22,000.

Survivors — this number is missing

In most places, far more people survive an overdose than die from one. They show up at an emergency room and get counted. Statewide there are about four ER visits for every overdose death. In Caswell there are fewer than two.

There are two reasons for that, and both point the same direction.

One — we have no hospital. Caswell EMS drives overdoses to Sovah Health in Danville. That is in Virginia, and Virginia hospitals do not report into North Carolina's system. Those visits happen. North Carolina simply never sees them.

Two — we are farther from help. Every county around us has a hospital inside its lines. We do not. Longer drives mean more overdoses end in a death instead of an ER visit.

05So how much is really happening here?

How the estimate works

Two simple pieces of arithmetic. Neither one needs anybody to admit anything.

For crime: we know how many Caswell people the courts convict. In every other county, crime reported and people convicted move together in a steady proportion. Apply that proportion to Caswell's convictions and you get what a county like ours would normally be reporting.

For overdoses: we know how many people died, and that number is solid. In every county around us there are between three and four ER visits for every overdose death. Apply that to our deaths and you get how many overdoses a county with our death toll would normally see.

The working range is 200 to 249 crimes a year. Against 71 reported, that means 129 to 178 crimes every year never reach the state's books — between 64% and 71% of all crime in the county. About seven in ten.

Over three years, 78 overdoses show up in North Carolina's records for Caswell County. Around 138 probably happened. Roughly 60 overdoses — real people, real ambulance calls — that this state never counted.

06The schools stopped reporting too

Here is the test. A student caught with drugs gets suspended either way, whether or not the district writes it up for the state. So the number of suspensions for each crime reported should hold steady. Across North Carolina it does — 19 to 20, every single year.

Caswell tracked the state for two years, then split off. Drug offenses went from 30 to 1. Weapons went from 10 to 3. Everything dropped at once — and a real drop in student drug use does not take weapons down with it.

"The data are self-reported by the districts, and the state agency does not conduct an official audit."

NC Department of Public Instruction, annual report to the General Assembly, 2024–25, page 122

And they had more officers, not fewer

The obvious innocent explanation is that the schools lost the officers who write the reports. The county's own meeting minutes say the opposite. In May 2023 — right before the year the reports dried up — the Sheriff told commissioners the county had four new grant-funded school officer positions on top of the three it already had.

More officers in the buildings. Fewer incidents written up. The school resource officer budget line now runs $466,448 a year.

07Two doors, and both of them are bad

Why it points to the second door

If people had stopped calling, the courts would have gone quiet with them. No call means no deputy, no charge, no conviction. But Caswell convictions held steady — 311 people in 2021-22, 329 in 2023-24 — straight through the years we reported the least crime in North Carolina.

Deputies are still making contact. Cases are still being charged. Judges are still convicting Caswell people at a rate normal for a rural county. What is not happening is those incidents showing up in what the county sends to the state.

The three explanations, side by side

• ×"Crime really did drop." Then the courts would have emptied out. They didn't — convictions held steady and rose slightly while reported crime sat at the state floor.
• ×"People stopped calling it in." If nothing got reported, there would be nothing to charge and convictions would have fallen too. They didn't.
• ✓"It is not being written up and passed on." This is the only one that fits every set of books at once — the Sheriff's, the schools', the courts' and the coroner's.