Officials Seek Audits of Milwaukee Police Crime Underreporting

State and local leaders called for independent audits of the Milwaukee Police Department's crime numbers, citing a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation...

Milwaukee Misreports Assaults to FBI, Understating Violent Crime

When Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn touted the city's fourth-straight year of falling crime in February, hundreds of beatings, stabbings and child abuse cases were missing from the count, says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More than 500 incidents since 2009 were misreported to the FBI as minor assaults and not included in the city's violent crime rate. That tally is based on a review of cases that resulted in charges - only about one-fifth of all reported crimes. The misreported cases found in 2011 alone are enough that Flynn would have been announcing a 1.1 percent increase in violent crime in February, instead of a 2.3 percent decline from the reported 2010 numbers, which also include errors.

At the request of the Journal Sentinel, FBI crime experts reviewed dozens of incidents and confirmed that they should have been labeled as aggravated assaults. In addition to the more than 500 misreported incidents, the investigation found at least 800 more that fit the same pattern but could not be confirmed through available public records. Criminologists reviewed the Journal Sentinel's findings and said they showed a pattern of misreporting that has helped drive down the city's crime rate. "Misreporting is cheating the public," said Michael Maltz, criminology professor at Ohio State University. He called the Journal Sentinel findings just "the tip of the iceberg."

Caught on Camera

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Quiet New Hampshire Experiences 'Unprecedented' Spate of Violence

The Boston Globe says 10 days of bloodshed in New Hampshire during April have left residents on edge in a state that prides itself on its low homicide rate. Ten violent deaths spanned the state geographically and occurred without discernible pattern. Jane Young, the senior assistant state attorney general, called the violence "unprecedented." The most prominent killing was that of Greenland Police Chief Michael Maloney, shot to death April 12 while serving a search warrant in a drug case.

Four other officers serving the warrant were wounded. Inside the home, the shooter, Cullen Mutrie, apparently killed his former girlfriend, Brittany Tibbetts, before killing himself. The first violent death occurred on April 7, when one man ran over another in Claremont. Five days later, on the same day as the Greenland tragedy, a shooting in Dalton left two dead and one wounded. On April 14, a man was fatally shot on a rural road in Chesterfield and on April 17 officials opened another homicide investigation into three more deaths in Lancaster. The deaths have left residents wondering what has happened to their quiet state.

Mlilwaukee Burglary Rise Tied to Metal Prices, Foreclosures

Much crime in Milwaukee is declining, but burglaries, auto thefts, robberies, and arson increased last year, says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Violent...

Move Over, Police?

By John Sodaro

Analysts explore some intriguing factors that may account for declining U.S. crime rates, and highlight one area of criminal behavior that gets little attention from cops on the beat.   

MI Governor Pledges Public Safety Funding for Crime-Ridden Cities

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is promising a state-led campaign to make Michigan's most troubled cities safer, reports the Wall Street Journal. This fight promises to be tough. Four of the 10 U.S. cities of at least 50,000 people with the highest 2010 violent-crime rates are in Michigan—Saginaw, Flint, Detroit and Pontiac. Two of those, Flint and Pontiac, are under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, and Detroit could soon become the third, after a state financial review is completed this month.

Under state law, emergency managers have wide authority to cut budgets, and law-enforcement costs have been among their targets. Pontiac's police department, for instance, was disbanded in 2011 and merged with the local sheriff's office. The Republican governor, who took office last year, sharply cut aid to cities and the working poor as part of a restructuring of the state's finances and tax code, which cut business taxes by $1.7 billion. His new budget, to be released Thursday, will include fresh spending to fight crime, primarily in the state's four most violent cities, including about $15 million to hire new law-enforcement officers, $20 million to help the cities' chronically unemployed and youth, and $12 million to make the criminal-justice system more efficient, including new jail space.

Review of Incident 'Memos' Casts Doubt on Crime Drop in Memphis

Memphis Police Department officials believe thousands of crimes over a five-year period were described in "memos" but never included in official crime statistics, reports the city's Commercial Appeal. Police Director Toney Armstrong said MPD officials discovered 79,000 memos written by officers from January 2006 through July 2011, many of which could have been criminal reports or investigations. He said the discrepancy was "brought to my attention" after he took the job in April 2011.

Armstrong said officers can write memos when there isn't enough information at the time of an initial investigation, but a review of the memos showed hundreds, possibly thousands, should have been upgraded. He said a sample of 20,000 memos from 2010 indicated that about one in every 15 should have been upgraded to a crime report, which would have then been included in crime statistics. The discovery could cast doubt on the crime-reduction numbers the department claimed under former police director Larry Godwin.

Criminologist: City Crime Rankings Don't Provide Useful Info

Experts say the City Crime Rankings published yearly by CQ Press are not accurate and should not be trusted, says the New Haven (CT) Register. They are based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, which warns that rankings “lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents,” said FBI spokesman Stephen Fischer Jr.

CQ publisher John Jenkins defends the rankings, saying, “Crime-ranking information contains many variables and that all must be considered carefully." Says criminologist Janet Lauritsen of the University of Missouri St. Louis: “Knowing the city in which a person lives does not provide useful information about the likelihood of becoming the victim of a violent or property crime. Victimization risk is more strongly associated with factors such as a person’s age and marital status, their lifestyle activities, such as where they spend their time at night, and the particular neighborhood that they live in within the city. Once these types of factors are taken into account, the city itself makes relatively little difference.”

Mind Boggling" L.A. Crime Decline Needs an Explanation

Los Angeles is in the midst of a crime drop so steep and profound it has experts scratching their heads, says Los Angeles Times columnist Sandy Banks. Crime fell in 2011 for the ninth year in a row. The city had fewer crimes last year — and a million and a half more people — than it did when "Leave It To Beaver" made its debut in 1957. "The numbers are mind-boggling," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tells Banks. "You can walk down Main Street in the middle of the day or night. That's something we haven't seen in my lifetime." Main Street is a downtown thoroughfare, once notorious for drugs and crime, now an area of eclectic shops and busy restaurants.

The reasons for the drop are complicated: better policing and more community involvement; fewer drugs and fuller prisons; an explosion in new technology; and the fading profile of violent gangs. The phenomenon ought to be scrutinized, Banks says. We need to know what mix of forces has conspired to drive crime down, so we can — in an era of shrinking resources — plan and spend wisely to keep this going.

Crime Down in L.A. Area; Beck: Economy Not Driving Force

Even since the economy began stalling several years ago, there have been dire warnings that crime would rise. In Southern California, says the Los Angeles...

Chicago Crime Numbers Are Down, Police Role Debated

Chicago is close to ending 2011 with fewer murders than last year, which saw the lowest number of those violent crimes in nearly a half a century, says the Chicago Tribune. From January through Tuesday, there were 423 murders in Chicago compared to 431 through the same period last year, say police statistics. That is a steady decline since 2008, when the city had 513 murders. A year later, that number was down to 459. Overall crime is down by 8 percent this year.

Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has overseen a makeover in the patrol division that included shifting more than 1,000 police officers from desk jobs, lockups and two specialized units to beat patrols. Criminologist Dennis Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago that if violent crime were to rise, it could be attributed to such factors as unprecedented contact between rival gangs, gang members looking to reclaim their authoritative positions in the neighborhood upon their return from prison, and instability in the illegal drug market. "This problem should not be the sole responsibility of the police," Rosenbaum said. "Studies around the world consistently suggest that violence, including gang violence, is the result of concentrated poverty, low-functioning schools, stressors on the family that lead to family dysfunction, a culture of violence through entertainment, media and sports, discrimination and exclusion."

NYC Crime Up or Down, Depending on How Strangulation is Counted

Major crime in New York City has risen in 2011 but less than 1 percent, says the New York Times. Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the number of felonies has gone down. His logic was rooted in a state law that created strangulation as a new class of crime. The law, which went into effect in late 2010, offered three definitions of strangulation (none resulting in a person’s death); first- and second-degree strangulation were felonies, and third-degree strangulation was a misdemeanor. The city’s theory is that many crimes now classified as second-degree strangulations would have been treated as misdemeanors or less before the new law took effect.

If those crimes were excluded from the 2011 felony total, overall crime would have fallen by 1.2 percent, Bloomberg said. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly cited criminologist Franklin Zimring of the University of California at Berkeley, whose recent book, “The City That Became Safe,” looks closely at the reduction in crime in New York City since 1991. “He says the reduction of crime in New York City is a Guinness Book of World Records reduction, not seen anywhere,” Kelly said. “He says — he’s a very definite voice in the business — that the reason for the dramatic, the Guinness Book of Records reduction over two decades, is police work. It’s as simple as that, as direct as that.”

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