State and local leaders called for independent audits of the Milwaukee Police Department's crime numbers, citing a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation...
Read full entry »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."
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By Dave Maass
14 states still allow the use of pepper spray in youth facilities as a ‘last resort.’
Read full entry »When he was running for re-election a month ago, Mayor Buddy Dyer said crime in Orlando was falling. New state statistics show Orlando's crime rate actually went up in 2011, and Orlando continues to hold the dubious distinction of having the highest crime rate among Florida's 10 biggest cities, says the Orlando Sentinel. Police Chief Paul Rooney contends that Orlando is much safer than the statistics indicate.
Steven R. Schlesinger, director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics from 1983 to 1988, died last week in Washington, D.C., at 68. For the past 13 years, Schlesinger was chief of the statistics division of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. He also had been a professor of political science at Rutgers and Catholic universities, and was director of the Justice Department's Office of Policy Development after leaving BJS.
The SEARCH organization said Schlesinger had worked with it on improving the data quality of criminal history records. SEARCH general counsel Robert Belair said, "Steve believed that complete and accurate criminal history record information is essential in order for the nation to make smart and effective criminal justice decisions." Schlesinger had bachelor's and master's degrees from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in political science from the Claremont Graduate School in California. He is survived by his wife, Lesley Solomon, two sons, and a grandson.
Read full entry »A New York Police Department whistleblower tells the New York Daily News he has been transferred to the graveyard shift at Bronx Central Booking in retaliation for raising red flags about crime reports at his old Queens precinct. Sgt. Robert Borrelli told internal investigators that cops in the 100th Precinct routinely downgraded crimes to keep the crime rate artificially low — and turned over the shady paperwork as proof.
The department’s Quality Assurance Division opened a probe and has upgraded some of the crimes from misdemeanors to felonies — a development that Borrelli says earned him the unwanted transfer and shunning from fellow officers. He calls his new assignment a form of “highway therapy” because it’s a much longer commute. His overtime has been reduced and a tire on his car was punctured outside his old precinct. He also faces departmental discipline for an argument with an officer. “It’s one word — retaliation,” he said. “They're coming after me because I opened my mouth.”
Reviewing the Feb. 19 Washington Post story on homicide clearance rates in Washington, D.C., the newspaper's ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, concludes that, "in its language and tone, it seemed to tell a story more of gotcha than of scandal. I don’t think D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier used trickery in her reporting of statistics to mislead the public about the solving of homicide cases." A "hopping mad" Lanier met with the Post to discuss the story, which prompted an editor's clarification.
Pexton says the story would have worked better if it had explained the "pitfalls" in the FBI-sanctioned procedure for reporting homicide clearance rates. He says the capital's police department should be clear in its annual reports about the "rolling rate" of reporting clearances--including previous year's closures in a current year's total--so that no one can suggest any manipulation. Journalists should include an explanation in stories on the subject, he says.
Read full entry »Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier touts the city’s astronomically high homicide closure rate — 94 percent for 2011 — but...
Read full entry »Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute is questioning the new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Intimate...
Read full entry »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.”
The U.S. Conference of Mayors denounced the expected release of city-by-city crime rankings by CQ Press as "an annual misuse of FBI
crime data at the expense of the reputations and economies of this nation’s cities" before the publisher delayed release of the volume until Dec. 8. The mayors accused CQ Press, a division of SAGE Publications, of defying "the FBI’s own warnings against using its data to rank U.S. cities by crime rate, and again this year mayors across the country are compelled to point out the damage that these inappropriate rankings can inflict on our cities,” said
Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors Criminal and Social Justice Committee.
“Everyone with the slightest knowledge of this issue knows the rankings are not credible, but the publication persists with them, presumably
because rankings are popular and sell books," Parker said. Unfortunately, they also do real harm to the cities that come out on the losing end. We’re encouraged that the nation’s news media have become more skeptical about the CQ rankings, and that in recent years have either ignored them altogether or noted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the American Society of Criminology all consider them bogus and damaging,” Parker said.
In a rare move for a highly regarded research institutions, Rand Corp. retracted a controversial report on crime around Los Angeles medical marijuana dispensaries after realizing that it failed to include any crimes reported by the city's Police Department, reports the Los Angeles Times. Rand researchers used crime data compiled by a firm that collects information from about 1,200 law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, but not the city.
"They made mistakes," said Debra Knopman, a Rand vice president. "What we're wrestling with is how the mistakes went undetected." The extraordinary lapse has the esteemed institution closely examining how it reviews its research. The discredited report went through an internal and an external peer review. The study of crime data near dispensaries published last month led Rand researchers to suggest that the stores, which usually have guards and surveillance cameras, may help reduce crime in their neighborhoods.
Read full entry »The Washington Post says Vice President Biden has been making "absurd" claims that more people will be murdered or raped if the Obama administration’s jobs bill is not passed. His argument is that in cities like Flint, Mi., the murder and rape rates have soared as the police force has been cut back for budgetary reasons. When challenged by a reporter from a conservative publication, Biden stood his ground and said without more money, “murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise.” As he put it, “Go look at the numbers.”
Murder did go up in Flint, though the rate did not double from 2009 to 2010, as Biden claimed. Rape has gone down. Biden asserted it had tripled. Concludes the Post: "The vice president should know better than to spout off half-baked facts in service of a dubious argument. Even if one believes there is a link between crime and the number of police—which is debatable and subject to many caveats—there is no excuse to make the dramatic claim that more people will die or be raped without additional funds for police."
Read full entry »The number of hate crime victimizations reported in 2009 was down nearly 40 percent from 2003, according to new data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Read full entry »Facing questions over whether crime statistics have been manipulated to cast the New York Police Department in a positive light, police commissioner Raymond Kelly chose three former federal prosecutors to review the department’s internal crime-reporting system, the New York Times reports. The Crime Reporting Review Committee will be given broad access to people and documents to review the ways the police department records, tracks and audits its own crime numbers.
“The integrity of our crime-reporting system is of the utmost importance to the department,” Kelly said. The three panel members have worked in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. They are David Kelley, who led the office from 2003 to 2005; Sharon McCarthy, who was a special counsel to Gov. Andrew Cuomo when he was state attorney general, and Robert Morvillo, a defense lawyer who is perhaps best known for defending Martha Stewart. Commissioner Kelly said the panel would look at “summary documents” on the nature and trends in crime classification; visit station houses to see the crime-reporting system firsthand; review the discipline meted out when problems are discovered; and assess how the police makes data public.
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