Why You Can’t Trust Crime Statistics

Some leftists have asserted, despite all evidence, that crime rates in blue states are no higher than in red states. One for this illusion is that Soros-backed DAs game the statistics. Another is that in many deep blue cities, residents simply no longer report crime, because they know police won’t investigate the case or pursue suspects, and that even if suspects are apprehended, those same Soros-backed DAs will simply let them go without bail. Another is that, even if citizens try to make a complaint, the police will simply refuse to take it, believing it to be a waste of their time.

Here New York City-to-Austin transplant Louis Rossmann talks about the decay of the Big Apple from it’s Rudy Giuliani broken windows policing heyday to its current state of disorder, and why you can’t trust the statistics.

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8 Responses to “Why You Can’t Trust Crime Statistics”

  1. Blackwing1 says:

    Back when we were living in the center of the Hive (Mpls) of the Soviet Socialist State of Minnesota, the insane collectivists of the city council passed a new graffiti law. Nobody really paid attention; I didn’t until I was bitten in the a$$ by it.

    It provided a system in which to report graffiti. I’d been hunting up in northern MN and came home to find my garage (along with more than half the garages up and down my alley) defaced by gang tags. Naively I called in and reported. It was only then that I learned that I had to wait 10 “working days” for the city to send out a crew to photograph the graffiti. Once they had completed that (and they did NOT notify you of the completion) you had 10 calendar days in which to remove or cover the graffiti. Failure to do so was a misdemeanor, subject to a citation and a $500 fine. The city would then send out a crew to cover/remove the graffiti, and would then charge (on top of the fine) the “cost” of the city crew, not to be less than $500.

    They basically created a system by which the victims of a crime were made to be criminals because of reporting it. As a natural result, two things happened.

    1) People used the system to screw over anyone they didn’t like, with the city imposing the fines and “removal costs” on their personal enemies.

    2) Reports of graffiti dropped like a ROCK.

    Well, gosh-golly-gee-whiz…with reports of graffiti reaching all-time lows in the city, it must have been the cleanest graffiti-free place on the planet! No, graffiti and vandlism sky-rocketed, but there were still no “reports”.

    Yet another reason why you can’t trust any statistic coming from the statist/collectivist/authoritarians running (what used to be) America’s cities.

  2. Dave L. says:

    That’s why homicide is the one statistic worth comparing. Dead bodies are hard to hide, and they’re tough to bury in the stats.

  3. Howard says:

    The subreddit TwoXChromosomes is a dumpster fire, BUT this is a topic they’ve discussed at length: in many jurisdictions, they will not record rapes, because mayors want to game the statistics. So when a woman goes to the police, unless she speaks the right words in her description, they classify it as something else or ignore the crime altogether.

    IIRC the website RAINN has details on what words women need to use to ensure their crime is indeed recorded and possibly even investigated (and to ensure their rape kit is correctly processed), for different jurisdictions.

    Frankly it’s a shitty sign of our our society is doing that such a resource (what words are needed in one jurisdiction or another) is even necessary.

  4. Wilbur says:

    It goes well beyond what’s mentioned above.

    A great many cities, counties and states use databases that do not have normalized data with geo data aliased.

    This happens to be a real example from a real place but with the real names changed to protect the guilty:

    If one searches the criminal activity database for the 2500 hundred block of East Beautified Dreamland City Boulevard one will find that block is the safest stretch of road in the entire state. Absolutely nothing in the way of crime has happened there in years.

    Search, instead for “2500 EBDCB” and you’ll find it’s a war zone – murders, rapes, armed robberies, auto thefts, assault & battery, prostitution, rampant drug arrests, arson, you name it, it happens there multiple times a day.

    Turns out all the reports and arrest info are submitted with “EDCB” rather than “East Beautified Dreamland City Boulevard” written out because no one will take the time to write the full name out, no one in the bureaucracy will tell you to change your search term and why, and none of the data submitted is aliased or normalized. Since all the data collection is electronic, as are the report outputs – including the FBI UCR data – it’s all sunshine, bunnies and butterlies in that neighborhood.

    For those not data junkies, “normalized data” means “one standard data format” meaning only one format is used in the database; in this instance “East Beautified Dreamland City Boulevard,” and all inputs are aliased to that. “Aliased” means “EBDCB, ” East BDCB,” “east DC Blvd,” “DC BVD east,” and “dc bvd e” and all the other variations are normalized to “East Beautified Dreamland City Boulevard” when entered into the database.

    Cops do “cop stuff” and computer systems are “not-cop stuff” so they get short shrift. A few places, mostly those which have adopted some form of NYC’s Compstat program,have better data but even those formats have data reporting weaknesses.

    Then there’s the “standard bureaucratic reluctance” to do things that “make management look bad” which is pervasive in both business and government but very heavily institutionalized in government and frequently behind the Fortified Government Bureaucracy Firewall and hard for mere citizens to get to because “unless you’ve been a cop for 20 years you cannot understand police work so we’ll interpret this for you.”

    Bottom line: As usual, you’re on your own (see Blackwing1’s comment above for additional clarification)

  5. Independent George says:

    Don’t miss his followup video on what finally drove him out of NYC despite living there his entire life, and having a number of highly skilled employees who could not make the move: being audited by the NYC department of revenue, and threatened with a tax liability greater than the total value of his business. End result: after almost a year of limbo with the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, the city found a 0.11% error rate in his taxes due to the coding of his point-of-sale software.

    The timing of the audit was especially curious: it happened right after he posted a series of videos on being ticketed by the city for a violation, where they couldn’t actually tell him what the law was or how it applied to his situation. He paid the fine despite a very good case that the law did not apply to his business, because it wasn’t worth the thousands of dollars it would take to appeal. Was it retaliation? A bankrupt city grifting for every last tax dollar? Who knows. But that was the last straw. Whatever the benefit to walkthrough traffic in NYC, it just wasn’t worth the stress anymore.

  6. Walsingham says:

    I just have one question. Which party does this guy vote for, either when in NY or now in Texas?

  7. Lawrence Person says:

    He voted for the Republican candidate for governor of NY last cycle.

  8. […] my previous post on crime statistics, several commenters (here and over on Instapundit) noted that Louis Rossmann had also put up a […]

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