Ever wonder about crimes in your neighborhood? LexisNexis may be able to help. The City Of Falcon Heights sent this link to a map of reported crimes. I have no idea if it’s really accurate. Here’s a sample shot:
That cluster of green and white crime markers on the lower left is Rosedale, a local shopping mall, and surrounding environs. The date range is 1/18/18 to today, or about a month.
But this sort of thing is only as valuable as the data is accurate, and to that point I’ve been sitting on a FiveThirtyEight post by Jeff Asher, the title of which gives the game away – Fewer Crimes Get Counted When Police Are Slow To Respond.
For this piece, I analyzed 2016 data from three cities, New Orleans, Detroitand Cincinnati,3 and found that as response times go up, the likelihood that a crime will be found goes down. Indeed, in all three cities, when police took more than two hours to respond, they were over 2.5 times more likely to report they’d found no evidence that a crime had occurred.
Nationwide, about 86 percent of all major crimes reported by the FBI in 2016 were property crimes (theft, auto theft and burglary). Violent crimes (such as murder and armed robbery) were much less common across the country and often received faster police responses in the cities analyzed here. Looking more closely at 911 calls reporting property crime, therefore, can show how longer response times may deflate the number of crimes that get investigated and ultimately reported.
It’s a good article, giving caveats where necessary – it’s worth a read.
In Detroit, only 16 percent of property crime incidents in which an officer arrived in under two hours received a disposition of unfounded, compared to 40 percent of dispositions following police response times of two hours or longer. Similarly, in New Orleans, 13 percent of incidents with a response time of under two hours received an unfounded disposition, compared to 46 percent of incidents with response times longer than two hours.
The problem was less acute but still apparent in Cincinnati’s data, which showed that 4 percent of 2016 property crime reports that were responded to in under two hours received an unfounded disposition, but 18 percent of such crimes where the response time was over two hours got the same designation. These three cities point to long response times as a contributing factor in the rate of recording of property crimes, though it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about the impact long response times have on national crime figures from such a limited sample.
My takeaway? There’s definitely an opportunity for unscrupulous politicians to reduce their police forces and have their official crime statistics drop. That said, the unscrupulous politician is often a hard-on-crime type, so a municipality with some sort of watchdog of the NGO sort would definitely be a hindrance to that politician.
On the flip side, the scrupulous politician who actually increases the police force may also find their official crime statistics rise. However, the rise might imply the police are investigating these crimes, resulting in arrests and prosecutions. Will this deter other potential crimes? Hard to say.
The whole thing seems to turn into a bit of a conundrum, but I suspect that in the unscrupulous scenario, the community would become unhappy with the general crime wave, whether it’s reported or not, and eventually rid themselves of the politician(s) at fault, either through denying them their seat of power – or the ambition of those politician(s) resulting in their promotion to higher seats of power.
