Manipulating crime statistics

Manipulating crime statistics

The annual ritual has hit us again - the preliminary figures of the national crime statistics, published each year by the FBI, in a report called Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports. On May 8, this report made the headlines in every major newspaper around the country, informing us that "Serious crime down again: 7% dip in'99" (USA Today) and "U.S. Crime Falls, 8th Year in a Row" (LA Times).

While these reports tell us that crime is down in recent years, recent polls reveal that citizens are more fearful of crime today than in previous years. The amount of crime reported in local newspapers and on the nightly news keeps increasing, as have the number of crime-related prime-time television programs and major motion pictures. Also, each year the Aofficial@ number of gangs and gang members increases. Finally, police keep arresting more and more people and the courts keep sending them to jails and prisons (our national imprisonment rate has increased four-fold in 20 years). If you think something is wrong here, you are right, because this report, accepted without question from the news media (including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, contrary to their anti- government position), tells us little or nothing about the actual amount of crime. Since you are probably confused, let me explain.

First I need to explain exactly what the Uniform Crime Reports is all about. There are two major sections of this report (found in any public library - look for yourself sometime). One focuses on "crimes known to the police," which are those offenses that come to the attention of police, mostly through calls from citizens; the other covers "persons arrested" - those suspects who have been placed under arrest. Therefore, neither of these categories is in any way a measure of actual criminal behavior, but are rather a measure of the extent to which citizens are willing to report crimes they either witness or are the victim of (it should be noted that most crimes are never reported to the police) and the local police department's process of fitting these reported offenses into the several crime categories that become part of the FBI's annual report (many get Alost@ in numerous ways). Also, the report reflects the success of the police in arresting suspects.

In this report, two broad categories of offenses are reported: Part I (also called "Index Crimes") and Part II offenses. The former consist of eight "categories" of offenses (I emphasis "categories" because each of them contains a variety of individual offenses, not just one crime), which are: homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft and arson (only these offenses are included in the Acrimes known to the police@ section). Part II offenses include 20 offense categories, such as "other assaults," fraud, embezzlement, vandalism, drug law violations, and DUI.

One immediate problem is that these "index crimes" are the ones that are reported periodically in the press and quoted constantly by public officials. The problem is that when they are reported the words "serious crimes" are usually used (as in the recent headlines), instead of simply "index crimes." There are many problems with this, not the least of which is the fact that many offenses included under the "Part II" grouping are at least as serious as many in the "index crime" grouping; with some far more serious, such as fraud and embezzlement (the monetary value of these crimes dwarf index property crimes), and kidnapping (included in a catch-all category called "all other offenses"). Furthermore, the index crimes lump together murder and shoplifting (the latter is included within the largest single category of index crimes, larceny-theft) - in other words, Aserious crimes@ include both murder and shoplifting!

The main problem is that the data reported in this annual report are among the most unreliable of all social data. They often become mired in politics and bureaucratic manipulation to put forward a positive image about the criminal justice system's response to crime. In fact, in recent years many police departments have been caught "cooking the books" concerning their official crime statistics. Some police administrators may knowingly falsify crime reports by undervaluing the cost of stolen goods, or report a "larceny from a person" that was an ordinary pick pocketing as a "robbery" (or vice versa), or even exaggerate the number of "gangs," and "gang members” in order to get federal funding to create or increase the size of a "gang unit." Scandals in several police departments in such cities as Philadelphia, Boca Raton, Florida, Atlanta and Buffalo, New York have been reported recently. During 1998 police departments in these cities were accused of falsely reporting crime statistics, resulting in resignations and demotions of high-ranking police officials. In one case, a police captain in Boca Raton downgraded property crimes like burglary to less serious misdemeanors crimes like vandalism and trespassing, resulting in a reduction of that city's felony rate by 11 percent. In one example, he reclassified as "vandalism" a case where a burglar stole $5,000 in jewelry and did more than $25,000 in damage. Philadelphia's problem was so bad that they had to withdraw their crime figures from the FBI report for 1996, 1997 and the first half of 1998. (Crime figures from entire states have had to be eliminated from the annual FBI report in recent years).

These are just some of the many problems associated with this report (there are many more, including the fact that corporate crime and all federal crimes are excluded). So you are probably wondering: is crime really down, like the report says? The answer is: we really don=t know.

For further reading: Controversies over crime statistics are nothing new, as criminologists have been writing about this subject for years. For an excellent critique see Clayton Mosher, Terance D.Miethe and Dretha M. Phillips, The Mismeasure of Crime. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002.