Examining crime statistics is difficult because there are no standardized definitions, reporting requirements, or databases that would meet scientific scrutiny. Every reporting agent has a lot of discretion on how, when, and if crimes are reported. To put this into perspective, determining whether a crime is "violent" or "non-violent" cannot be reconciled. For example, a "bank robbery" is categorically a "crime of violence" under sentencing guidelines, even if the bank robber slips the teller a note and later walks out the front door without creating a disturbance.
-HPD, or any police departments "reaction" to a real world occurrence, is usually compelled by the legislative body. That is, if the legislature decides "no more guns", the police department will act on that impulse. If the legislature decides to decriminalize retail theft, the police will no longer enact arrest. Now, there is a huge intersectionality between the people, politicians, police, and the "nexus" of what connects them all are media instruments. I could write a whole thesis on how they are all connected and it's a very complicated issue.
-"Suicide" is sometimes reported as "gun crime". One thing to remember is that the study of statistics exists because there are many way of interpreting sets of data, especially when is it a multivariate analysis. By simply shifting definitions, you can make the same set of data say many different things. For example, "gun violence", "gun crime", "gun homicide", and "gun injury" could all be measured in the same set, or any combination of those sets if we are talking about "suicide". In contrast, "gun violence" could include any crime from brandishing a firearm to the worst mass shootings in American history.
Edit: Something like the UCR is probably the "best" centralized openly-published source of crime data we have, but it is not considered "academic" or "scientific" by nature. This data is considered "self-reported" and not a "measurement". Participation in the UCR is voluntary. Some agencies report directly to the FBI; some agencies report to agencies that report to the FBI; some agencies do not report anything at all. Things become significantly more complicated when elements like "race" or magnitude are examined. Considering all of this, it does not dissuade people from quoting the data as if it is a scientific measurement.
If anyone has ever done, or is planning on doing a criminal justice study, they will likely have to examine a specific police departments data that they collected themselves for the above reasons. Since police departments don't like to hand this information over, or if they have it, it's usually unusable, your experimental design usually includes methods of data collection designed to withstand scrutiny. This is why I only believe data when it's presented in a peer-reviewed published journal. Statistics on the UCR, Wikipedia, or in news articles will never give you the "big picture" and the stats you see are almost always biased/slanted towards a narrative.