Sunday, January 03, 2010
Opinion

Why more crime reports can be good

Don’t be surprised if, in the coming year, with Pennington gone and the new mayor aiming to keep more cops on the force, crime goes up—on paper.

By Stephanie Ramage

When I was in school at the University of Georgia, I worked at the independent student newspaper, The Red and Black, where one of the sportswriters was so painfully shy that he adamantly refused to interview anyone.    

    He never talked to athletes or coaches, but after every game he’d nab the player statistics sheet from the assistant coach or team manager and write a story from those. His stories read like wine lists: You’d see a player’s name, and then a string of numbers behind it. Unfortunately, his style of reporting sometimes resulted in inaccurate accounts. He might, for example, report that a player had been allowed in a game for only a few minutes, failed to score and was yanked out by the coach. To readers, it would look as though the coach was a hardass or the player was incompetent. In truth, because the reporter didn’t talk to the coaches or to the players, he might have been unaware that the player was recovering from an illness and his brief time in the game was a coach’s way of seeing if he was ready to come back.

    The reporter wasn’t evil. He didn’t mean to hurt anyone. He just knew he had to write something, and he had a problem to work around. Consequently, he focused more on the numbers than on making sure that what he reported was accurate.

    An editor figured out what was going on by comparing that reporter’s coverage to his own conversations with coaches and athletes. The editor told me, in so many words, “You know what’s scary? What if we were the only paper reporting on these teams and there was no way to find out the truth? Everyone would think it was the way [the reporter] said it was.”

    Thus, statistics can indeed lie, or at least not tell the whole story, when they are relied upon to the exclusion of everything else.

    For the past year, Atlantans in some neighborhoods have consistently complained to me that crime seems to have gotten worse, even though the Atlanta Police Department has proudly pointed to lower crime statistics. A couple of weeks ago, the APD invited me over to its Central Records unit to see how crime reports are processed. Which I appreciate, but which proved, just as I expected, nothing.

    The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the only daily newspaper in town, has also pointed to the APD’s low crime stats to justify the paper’s dearth of opinion editorials on crime for the past couple of years, as well as its smarmy coverage of Atlanta’s anti-crime movement. A few months ago, an editor at the AJC commented on a blog that he wanted to see proof (from the APD, no less) that crime stats were being manipulated.

    The trouble is, crime underreporting doesn’t happen in the APD’s Central Records office.

    It happens, as it did when APD Chief Richard Pennington was chief of the New Orleans Police Department, at the scene of the crime. It is most often a matter of a cop never taking a report in the first place. And, usually, it is not the result of a memo from the chief. Instead, the chief sets a certain tone for the department by focusing on some things and letting others slide. Like the poor sports reporter, he might have a problem he’s working around—like having too few cops—and he might become more concerned about how his department is perceived than how safe the citizens really are.

    As Rafael Goyeneche, president of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, told me in November, Pennington was besotted with COMSTAT, a crime data mapping system that he later brought to Atlanta. Basically, it’s a numbers tracker. By focusing on the numbers of crime, rather than crime itself, Pennington set a tone in the NOPD that encouraged district majors (what we call zone majors in Atlanta) to compete with each other for low crime stats. The result was cops underreporting crime. Unwittingly or not, employees in any institution tend to pick up on what matters to their boss, and they act accordingly.

    When a cop refuses to take a report on the crime you have experienced, that cop is underreporting, and you should insist on talking with his supervising officer. If you call 911 to report a crime and a police officer never shows up and you never follow up to make sure a report is taken, you are in the very midst of underreporting crime (although our 911 center's horrific delays can take some of the blame). If you don’t stick around to talk to the officer and he leaves a card but you don’t call him, then you’re actually helping to underreport crime.

    Why don’t the cops get there sooner? When a police force is understaffed, its ability to respond to calls and take reports is compromised.

    Which means more police can mean more reports.      

    So don’t be surprised if, in the coming year, with Pennington gone and the new mayor aiming to keep more cops on the force, crime goes up—on paper. It may be that the AJC trumpets “CRIME SOARS!” while you and your neighbors notice fewer robberies and less vandalism, and generally feel safer in your neighborhood. What matters is the real safety of the citizens. And that means more cops, more reports and yes, maybe even a higher crime rate, at least until the deterrent effect of a larger police force sinks in.

    More important than the crime stats are the conversations between the police and the residents. I, for one, am looking forward to having a police chief who doesn’t hide his unwillingness to talk with people behind a page of statistics. SP