« Bold Daytime Forced Entry Attempt by Three Masked Intruders Thwarted | Main | Go Get Hugged! »
The Big Lie of Crime Stats
How the Big Lie Lies
Crime stats lie. They get right up in your face and lie. But the numbers themselves don’t offend: they simply get used and abused by someone or some organization who usually wishes to put a positive spin on those numbers.
How do they lie? Say you go to the fridge to get some chocolate ice cream and discover just a tiny tablespoon in the bottom of the box, so you turn to your pie-eyed, all innocent looking ten year old, the one with chocolate ringing their mouth, and ask, “Did you eat all the ice cream?”. “No, no, I didn’t eat all the ice cream.” says the ten year old, speaking with all the weight and conviction of truth.
Well, technically that is not a lie, since a lonely tablespoon of ice cream still remains in the box, but it is not the whole story either. It is a partial truth or a “spin” on the truth. It is a manipulation of the facts so that they appear to tell the story that the speaker wants you to hear. So it is with crime stats.
Statistics are easily manipulated to mislead the public.
I bring this up because I read a Boston Globe article titled Major Crime down 13%, through the first 5 months of the year, and that drew a chuckle from me because I understand the spin, and I fully expect to read or hear the same kind of spin coming out of our City Hall sometime in the not so distant future.
Once you get past the headline with the big bold Major crime down 13%, you get into the nitty-gritty of the stats, which community leaders living in crime ridden areas of Boston greeted with derision.
Most of the 13% decrease came in only 2 areas, Vehicle Theft, and Larceny. Larceny includes theft not fear inducing, such as car radio thefts.
Murders stayed the same, did not go down, but the headline did not read “Murder rate stays the same for period as City fails to reduce murder rate for another year!": that also would have been an accurate headline.
Rapes went down by a total of 5. No mention of how rapes usually go unreported
But the real news is that Burglary, thefts from residences, increased by 7% and that Robbery, often involving the use of force, jumped by 8%.
The Globe could have used a headline that read, "Home Invasions and Robberies up 15%", and that would have been just as accurate as "Major crime down 13%", but it would have given the reader a much different impression. Manipulation!
But all that involves manipulating the numbers. The numbers gathered themselves lie, because they are not accurate. How do crime stats deceive us?
Many crimes go unreported, and some are under-reported, such as rapes, robberies, theft from motor vehicles, and assaults.
If the police do not generate an incident report number the crime does not make the stats. Say you report an incident of vandalism and property damage, and the police who come and view the damage say “we will keep an eye on your property if we can and try to catch the perps.” But unless you ask for an incident report number, they usually will not offer you one, and they usually won’t write one up and submit it. So that crime will never be used to calculate the crime stats. It’s like it never happened.
Now in whose interest would it be to encourage police to write a minimum number of incident reports?
Some crimes are miscategorized, put in a less serious category. Another manipulation.
A GCCC member had a stolen car abandoned in her drive and had to pay to have it towed. It was never reported stolen, yet she was a victim of crime: will she show up in the crime stats? No.
So the next time this City Administration trots out its Good News Crime Stats, have a good laugh.
Just look around you and what you see and hear is what you get: Car thefts, drug dealing, home invasions.
I’m hearing that this administration is soft on crime for various reasons having to do with politics. They should be protecting the electorate not pandering to criminals for political gain. I don’t think it ever pays politically to be soft on crime. Look at what happened to Mike Dukakis, he lost a presidential election on the issue.
This City Administration needs to empower the police to do their job and protect the citizenry from criminals. No more political pandering. Get tough!
John Twomey
Posted at July 21, 2005 11:20 AM