Crime Statistics are the biggest lie ever told to the American People. There are no statistics anywhere to prove that Three Strikes, Mandatory Minimums, Prisons, and the Death Penalty reduces crime.
There are many studies to reinforce prevention and rehabilitation, restorative justice techniques as being far more effective. Is anyone looking for solutions to crime, or is the goal to build the prison industrial complex to support the bureaucracy?
There are reasons to mistrust crime statistics
By Alan W. Bock
Politicians of both major parties point with pride to declining crime rates, as shown by official statistics, as evidence that their policies are working. There are reasons, however, to doubt that those statistics really reflect reality.
By the time they are compiled, the statistics are older than is usually acknowledged. The data in California's 1997 crime report,for example, were compiled by local agencies and reported in 1995.Yet they are sometimes used to tout the wisdom of policies put in place after their compilation Nobody forces police agencies to get their reports in to the state, so there is no consistency from year to year to the number of police agencies reporting.
Criminologists believe an average of 30 percent of cities in California never report,but it could be 30 percent one year, 42 percent the next and 23 percent the following.Other states show similarly varying non-reporting in other states. In California, Oakland hasn't reported for several years. Has there beenno crime in Oakland?
The upshot is that it is virtually impossible to compare crime statistics from year to year with any reliability.
A fingerprint card is supposed to accompany felony arrest information sent to the state. When those fingerprint cards do not accompany the records, those crimes are not included in the report.
Some criminologists estimate this variable to be as high as 40 percentto 60 percent of the records without fingerprint cards.
The criteria for the seven serious crimes included in the national FBI report have changed over the years. Arson has been dropped and added again, the minimums for serious property crimes changed from$200 to $400. That makes it even more difficult to discern valid year-to-year trends.
The FBI does not maintain a uniform, independent data baseon crime. Its annual Uniform Crime Report is based on reports from state governments, most of which are at least two years old by the time the FBI gets them, and all of which have approximately as many anomalies as are found in the California reports. The crime reports do not take into account demographic factors like the number of males aged 18-25 (the most crime-prone sector) as a percentage of the general population.
The California report uses sampling to create its estimates- analyzing 45 percent of reportable crimes in 1997, a larger amount the previous year. Sampling can be sophisticated and might be necessary, but it reduces the reliability factor.
According to FBI Victimization Survey released in September 1997, based on door-to-door surveys in sampled neighborhoods, only three of 10 crimes are ever reported to the police. Perhaps most of those unreported crimes are considered too minor to report, but nobody really knows.
Political pressure to show success at reducing crime may be leading to fudging. So far this year, as New York Times writer Fox Butterfield recently reported, there have been charges of falsely reporting crime statistics in New York Atlanta and Boca Raton, Fla.,resulting in the resignations of high-ranking police commanders. ``In Boca Raton, for example,´´ Butterfield write, ``a police captain ... systematically downgraded property crimes like burglaries to vandalism,trespassing or missing property, reducing the city's felony rate by almost 11 percent. Philadelphia has withdrawn its crime figures for 1996, 97 and the first half of 1998 because of sloppiness, downgrading and underreporting.
Most of the criminologists I talked to are aware of most of these shortcomings, but believe that murder is a fairly reliable indicator (since there is usually a body and the victim usually has relatives) and murder rates are down. So perhaps crime really is down.
On the other hand, it is possible that since 40 to 60 percent of felony reports to the state do not include a fingerprint card, some of those felonies might be murders, so the murder rate might be somewhat higher than state reports suggest. And the fact the Oakland hasn't reported to the state in three years means at least some murders don't show up in the state reports.
I would love to believe that serious crime is finally declining. For reasons I outlined a few weeks ago I doubt if the Three Strikes law has had much of an impact on crime rates, but it is just possible that various factors - a reduction n the percentage of young males, the peaking of the crack cocaine epidemic, economic growth finally having an impact on the propensity to do crime rather than go to work - have led to a reduction in crime.
But it is an illusion to place too much credence in the details of the official reports. And they may be dead wrong.
Mr. Bock is the Register's senior editorial writer.
Experts cast doubt on FBI's statistics
Bay Area data called too sketchy to analyze
Bill Wallace, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
chart attached
Crime in nearly a dozen big Bay Area cities, which has been declining for 10 years, went back up last year, according to figures released Monday by the FBI. But experts who study the causes of crime say this does not seem to be a big problem, largely because of the way crime statistics are created -- the FBI releases simply the number of crimes committed in a given city without correlating that number with an increase in population.
Bay Area cities in the FBI study all had populations of 100,000 or more. Nine communities -- Berkeley, Concord, Daly City, Fremont, Oakland, San Jose, Santa Clara, Santa Rosa and Vallejo -- reported increases in crime, ranging from 10.5 percent in Santa Rosa to nearly 20 percent in Berkeley. Hayward was the only one of the 12 Bay Area cities that saw an overall decrease in reported crimes during 2001.
The trends for two other large Bay Area cities could not be determined from the FBI data released Monday. San Francisco failed to provide complete crime-report statistics to the bureau in time to be included in the FBI's preliminary tally, an FBI spokeswoman told The Chronicle. However, information on the San Francisco Police Department's own Web site indicates that the city had a 2.97 percent increase in overall reports of crime last year -- compared with the 7.3 percent decrease it reported between 1999 and 2000.
The other city, Richmond, was included in the FBI report, but it has changed its record-keeping methods so the data it reported this year could not be compared accurately to figures for 2000. The local increases were in a preliminary analysis of Uniform Crime Reports for 2001 released by the FBI Monday. According to the report, the Bay Area cities that reported increases were not unique:
The FBI noted a 2 percent hike in the overall crime reports nationwide, and an increase of 2.2 percent in property crimes. Most troubling was the violent crime category: Reported homicides rose 3.1 percent last year, while robberies rose 3.9 percent. Despite the apparent increases, criminology experts and law enforcement sources said the statistics might not be as worrisome as they seemed.
Carter Hay, a sociologist who specializes in the causes of crime and delinquency at Washington State University, said the data released by the FBI represented only the actual number of offenses reported without any correction for population. "The problem with that is, any increase in the number of offenses that are being reported may simply result from the fact that the population is larger now than it was a year ago," he said.
"When you figure out the actual crime rate by calculating the number
of reported crimes per 100,000 residents, it may turn out that there is
no increase in the rate at all. The rate may even be lower in some categories."
The figures released by the FBI Monday represent a preliminary tabulation
of data voluntarily provided to the bureau by 17,000 U.S. law enforcement
agencies. In addition to the fact that they are not adjusted for population,
the figures have a variety of drawbacks, including the fact that some departments
did not provide raw information for certain crime categories, and others
collected statistics
incorrectly, the FBI report said.
Law enforcement agencies and criminology experts contacted by The Chronicle
said they did not believe the preliminary figures should cause concern.
Even if the numbers do represent an increase in criminal activity, the
increases are small given the
long-standing decline in crime rates over the past 20 years, they said.
They also said that if it turned out that the crime rate was actually going
up for the first time in more than a decade, there was no obvious reason
for the trend.
"For Concord, I would look at changes in the demographics of the area and the age groups," said Tony Giovinno, a data analyst for the Concord police. "I suspect it's mostly demographic changes, but that is just a guess. . . . I don't think there is anything specific that you can point your finger at." Officers at other agencies offered similar explanations. "Some of the factors we look at are the economy, whether people are out of work or not, that sort of thing," said Officer Joseph Deras of the San Jose police. "When people are not working, sometimes they might turn to crime to make some money, at least for the short run."
Experts said the data released by the FBI yesterday were just too sketchy
and incomplete for serious analysis. "It's really too early for us to assess
what's happening in terms of crime trends," said Lieutenant Cynthia Harris,
a detective in the Berkeley
Police Department and the agency's spokeswoman. Others noted that the
numbers for some types of crime analyzed in the UCR report were so small
that even large changes might be meaningless.
E-mail Bill Wallace bwallace@sfchronicle.com
Bay Area crime indexNumbers below show percent change
and crime index totals for the years 2000 and 2001.
The crime index for a jurisdiction is the total number
of crimes for the listed categories that were reported
to the FBI for the Uniform Crime Report.
There is incomplete data in FBI report for San
Francisco and Richmond so they are not included. In
order of percentage increase from previous year..Y -
2000X - 2001 .-
Berkeley: +19.6%Y - 7,731X - 9,246-
Concord: +13.9%Y - 4,964X - 5,653-
Daly City: +7.9%Y - 2,140X - 2,300-
Fremont: +15.7%Y - 5,354X - 6,193-
Vallejo: +2.5%Y - 7,137X - 7,316-
Hayward: -2.2%Y - 5,711X - 5,586-
Santa Clara: +6.9%Y - 3,175X - 3,395-
Santa Rosa: +10.5%Y - 5,340X - 5,899-
Oakland: +10.3%Y - 24,350X - 27,955-
San Jose: +10.1%Y - 23,196X - 25,550.
Source: FBI
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