Are these recommendations something that can be easily passed over to the crime stat collectors in a big American city? For example, I’m in MA and Boston is having a world-beating year for murders (in a good way! Very few!) but there hasn’t been much abt WHY this is happening. It could be good policing, it could be pure dumb luck, it could be that rising property values pushing crime into lower-property-value suburbs.
"The Vast Majority Of Crime Is Not Reported To Law Enforcement
Per the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice, 42 percent of violent crimes are reported to law enforcement. Thirty-two percent of property crimes are reported to the police.
Twenty-six million Americans were victimized by identity theft in 2016 and only seven percent of victims called the police according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
74 percent of violent victimizations against juveniles were not reported to the police per the Office of Juvenile Justice And Delinquency Prevention of the USDOJ.
4,000 police agencies did not participate in crime reporting to the FBI in 2023.
The effort to get law enforcement agencies to fully use the FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System remains a problem.
Murder is down 26 percent in the FBI's first quarter preliminary-unofficial statistics of 2024 but that’s a reflection that urban homicides increased by 50 percent in the cities measured (2019-2022) per the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Crime statistics cannot grow by those percentages without substantially declining in subsequent years regardless of interventions. It’s always been that way.
Cops are tired of making arrests and not seeing offenders prosecuted or held in jail pretrial, so they don't.
Arrests and crimes solved have plummeted during recent decades.
Thousands of police officers have left the job and sometimes there are long waits for an officer to arrive at a crime scene and the complainant gives up and disengages. There are multiple reports of cities having hundreds of police officers down from authorized levels. Two US Department of Justice agencies call the lack of cops in cities a crisis.
Crime-ridden Oakland has just 35 officers on patrol across the city at any given moment, the police department has admitted. The admission by the Oakland Police Department came after local news station KTVU asked them how it took cops 48 hours to respond to a July 4 shooting at an apartment complex during which residents reported hearing over 100 gunshots.
When responding to burglar alarms, smaller cities also commonly receive a faster response time, while medium cities “take an average of 40 minutes,” says Don Chon, a professor of criminology at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama. In larger cities it could take several hours for police to respond, if they respond at all.
What All This Means
First, this means the overwhelming majority of what we call crime is not reflected in FBI or local crime statistics. There are reasons for not reporting crimes or suspicious activities. That means you would have to have SUBSTANTIAL reductions or increases in crime for the data to be meaningful.
Second, if justice system employees feel that cities are being less than honest as to their crime statistics, some examples (like yours) provide credibility."
All of this doesn't begin to touch the huge increase in violent crime per the National Crime Victimization Survey, a wasted opportunity to investigate why the increase took place because everyone seems intent on ignoring it.
Finally, we have significant reductions in police staffing. If a major city like Oakland, CA has 35 officers per shift, taking crime reports is not high on the list of priorities. Philadelphia is down over 1,000 officers. Cities want officers to be available for makor breaking events thus recording of crimes takes a distant second place.
AI
To get an accurate and prompt analysis of local crime, it will take a complex undertaking involving AI taking in all possible variables.
We would never make pronouncements in the medical world based on a fraction of the available data. Businesses invest billions in understanding as many metrics as possible. Why don't we????
It will take an AI understanding of crime survey data (Including Gallup) and unreported crimes and police staffing to give us the metrics we need. But at the moment, we are struggling with a sole focus on REPORTED crime which is a very small subset of total crime that is hampered by police staffing.
As a former police officer, I was told to respond quickly to crimes regardless of the events that had taken place immediately before a significant need for me to be somewhere else. Superiors didn't care about the status of my paperwork, they wanted me to be on the scene of a crime or major accident in progress.
I'm convinced that there will never be a truly accurate account of local or national crimes. Reported crime may be instructive and give us indications but no serious medical researcher would tell us that there has been a five percent increase or decrease in what they are studying without including endless competing variables that sway the data one way or another.
I just read a story on mammograms as being insufficient in establishing many forms of breast cancer and the need to switch to MRIs. Yet we continue tend to push mammograms. A more complete understanding of the data was necessary to move us onto the right path.
AI should be able to analyze all of the independent variables and give us a far more precise understanding of crime. We want cops to complete more reports and the NIBRS requires more attention to detail which is wonderful "if" police officers weren't madly running from call to call .
BJS has the data they need to concurrently analyze crime for SMSAs.
So the FBI reports 11,000 hate crimes and the BJS reports an average of 250,000. We make pronouncements on hate crimes based on the 11,000 which strikes me as potentially and ethically wrong.
Only AI can create an analysis of all forms of crime and crime reporting and create a somewhat accurate picture of crime both locally and nationally. Yes, it would take a massive undertaking and the funding necessary.
But for the moment, telling me that crime has increased or decreased five percent, while instructive, is open to so many errors that for the sake of policy, it tends to be of limited use.
Are these recommendations something that can be easily passed over to the crime stat collectors in a big American city? For example, I’m in MA and Boston is having a world-beating year for murders (in a good way! Very few!) but there hasn’t been much abt WHY this is happening. It could be good policing, it could be pure dumb luck, it could be that rising property values pushing crime into lower-property-value suburbs.
Hi Jeff: Form my article today on https://crimeinamerica.net:
"The Vast Majority Of Crime Is Not Reported To Law Enforcement
Per the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the US Department of Justice, 42 percent of violent crimes are reported to law enforcement. Thirty-two percent of property crimes are reported to the police.
Twenty-six million Americans were victimized by identity theft in 2016 and only seven percent of victims called the police according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
74 percent of violent victimizations against juveniles were not reported to the police per the Office of Juvenile Justice And Delinquency Prevention of the USDOJ.
4,000 police agencies did not participate in crime reporting to the FBI in 2023.
The effort to get law enforcement agencies to fully use the FBI’s new National Incident-Based Reporting System remains a problem.
Murder is down 26 percent in the FBI's first quarter preliminary-unofficial statistics of 2024 but that’s a reflection that urban homicides increased by 50 percent in the cities measured (2019-2022) per the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Crime statistics cannot grow by those percentages without substantially declining in subsequent years regardless of interventions. It’s always been that way.
Cops are tired of making arrests and not seeing offenders prosecuted or held in jail pretrial, so they don't.
Arrests and crimes solved have plummeted during recent decades.
Thousands of police officers have left the job and sometimes there are long waits for an officer to arrive at a crime scene and the complainant gives up and disengages. There are multiple reports of cities having hundreds of police officers down from authorized levels. Two US Department of Justice agencies call the lack of cops in cities a crisis.
Crime-ridden Oakland has just 35 officers on patrol across the city at any given moment, the police department has admitted. The admission by the Oakland Police Department came after local news station KTVU asked them how it took cops 48 hours to respond to a July 4 shooting at an apartment complex during which residents reported hearing over 100 gunshots.
When responding to burglar alarms, smaller cities also commonly receive a faster response time, while medium cities “take an average of 40 minutes,” says Don Chon, a professor of criminology at Auburn University in Montgomery, Alabama. In larger cities it could take several hours for police to respond, if they respond at all.
What All This Means
First, this means the overwhelming majority of what we call crime is not reflected in FBI or local crime statistics. There are reasons for not reporting crimes or suspicious activities. That means you would have to have SUBSTANTIAL reductions or increases in crime for the data to be meaningful.
Second, if justice system employees feel that cities are being less than honest as to their crime statistics, some examples (like yours) provide credibility."
All of this doesn't begin to touch the huge increase in violent crime per the National Crime Victimization Survey, a wasted opportunity to investigate why the increase took place because everyone seems intent on ignoring it.
Finally, we have significant reductions in police staffing. If a major city like Oakland, CA has 35 officers per shift, taking crime reports is not high on the list of priorities. Philadelphia is down over 1,000 officers. Cities want officers to be available for makor breaking events thus recording of crimes takes a distant second place.
AI
To get an accurate and prompt analysis of local crime, it will take a complex undertaking involving AI taking in all possible variables.
We would never make pronouncements in the medical world based on a fraction of the available data. Businesses invest billions in understanding as many metrics as possible. Why don't we????
It will take an AI understanding of crime survey data (Including Gallup) and unreported crimes and police staffing to give us the metrics we need. But at the moment, we are struggling with a sole focus on REPORTED crime which is a very small subset of total crime that is hampered by police staffing.
As a former police officer, I was told to respond quickly to crimes regardless of the events that had taken place immediately before a significant need for me to be somewhere else. Superiors didn't care about the status of my paperwork, they wanted me to be on the scene of a crime or major accident in progress.
I'm convinced that there will never be a truly accurate account of local or national crimes. Reported crime may be instructive and give us indications but no serious medical researcher would tell us that there has been a five percent increase or decrease in what they are studying without including endless competing variables that sway the data one way or another.
I just read a story on mammograms as being insufficient in establishing many forms of breast cancer and the need to switch to MRIs. Yet we continue tend to push mammograms. A more complete understanding of the data was necessary to move us onto the right path.
AI should be able to analyze all of the independent variables and give us a far more precise understanding of crime. We want cops to complete more reports and the NIBRS requires more attention to detail which is wonderful "if" police officers weren't madly running from call to call .
BJS has the data they need to concurrently analyze crime for SMSAs.
So the FBI reports 11,000 hate crimes and the BJS reports an average of 250,000. We make pronouncements on hate crimes based on the 11,000 which strikes me as potentially and ethically wrong.
Only AI can create an analysis of all forms of crime and crime reporting and create a somewhat accurate picture of crime both locally and nationally. Yes, it would take a massive undertaking and the funding necessary.
But for the moment, telling me that crime has increased or decreased five percent, while instructive, is open to so many errors that for the sake of policy, it tends to be of limited use.
My opinions. Best, Len.