As has been reported on this blog and in many other places, crime across the cities of this country has been on a tear the last two years the likes of which we have not seen for decades. After a generation of keeping our nerve and getting tough under Bill Clinton and George Bush, we decided that the real problem is thuggish police and overcrowded prisons. So we started down the road of policing consent decrees and retroactively lowered sentences.
Liking the results?
But wait, it gets worse. Lots worse.
With a hat tip to Sentencing Law and Policy, I repeat its entry today about the staggering degree to which crime never gets reported at all (and therefore never winds up in our quickly worsening crime statistics):
John Gramlich writing for the Pew Reseach Center has this new data brief reviewing basic data on crime reporting and resolution. The piece is headlined "Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. go unsolved," and here is how it gets started and concludes:The SL&P entry is accompanied by the graphs displayed below and to the right. They show, among other things, that theft and rape are reported less than a third of the time, and that only about two in five simple assaults are reported. Question: What do you think this tells us about the reporting, and thus the reliability, of crime statistics for consensual crimes like drug dealing and alien smuggling -- two of the most important components of federal criminal jurisdiction? Hint: That their actual incidence is vastly greater than their reported incidence. Next question: What does that tell you about federal recidivism statistics, (http://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2017/20170221_Recidivism-Drugs.pdf) -- statistics that peg the recidivism rate for drug offenders at a "mere" 50% (see p. 3 of the linked report). Hint: That the 50% figure is a joke. I will bet $10,000 here and now that the actual recidivism rate for drug dealing is closer to 100%. Next question: And what does that tell you about what happens when we lower sentences for drug dealers? Hint: That it's all but guaranteed they'll get back in business even sooner than they would have otherwise. Next question: And what does that tell you about the wisdom of reducing those sentences, especially for the drug- and violence-ravaged neighborhoods in our inner cities? Hint: That one you can answer for yourself.Only about half of the violent crimes and a third of the property crimes that occur in the United States each year are reported to police. And most of the crimes that are reported don't result in the arrest, charging and prosecution of a suspect, according to government statistics.
In 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, 47% of the violent crimes and 35% of the property crimes tracked by the Bureau of Justice Statistics were reported to police. Those figures come from an annual BJS survey of 90,000 households, which asks Americans ages 12 and older whether they were victims of a crime in the past six months and, if so, whether they reported that crime to law enforcement or not.
Even when violent and property crimes are reported to police, they're often not solved - at least based on a measure known as the clearance rate. That's the share of cases each year that are closed, or "cleared," through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution. In 2015, 46% of the violent crimes and 19% of the property crimes reported to police in the U.S. were cleared, according to FBI data.
Reporting and clearance rates for violent and property crimes have held relatively steady over the past two decades, even as overall crime rates in both categories have declined sharply. Between 1995 and 2015, the share of violent crimes reported to police each year ranged from 40% to 51%; for property crimes, the share ranged from 32% to 40%. During the same period, the share of violent crimes cleared by police ranged from 44% to 50%; for property crimes, annual clearance rates ranged from 16% to 20%.
There are several caveats to keep in mind when considering statistics like these. Like all surveys, the BJS survey has a margin of error, which means that the share of violent and property crimes reported to police might be higher or lower than estimated. The FBI clearance rate data, for their part, rely on information voluntarily reported by local law enforcement agencies around the country, and not all departments participate.
The FBI's clearance rates also don't account for the fact that crimes reported in one year might be cleared in a future year. In addition, they count some cases that weren't closed through arrest, but through "exceptional means," such as when a suspect dies or a victim declines to cooperate with a prosecution....
Clearance rates are highly susceptible to manipulation, and on a regular basis, are indeed artificially increased.
Here's how it works. Police can claim a clearance (by UCR standards) by making an arrest, or by claiming the crime itself has been disproven and is "unfounded", or by claiming what's called an "Exceptional Clearance Arrest", or ECA. This would be (when legitimate) as, for instance, when the suspect is killed by the cops during or after the crime. It might also be when the prosecutor refuses to prosecute, or the victim refuses to come to court. SInce these instances can negate good police work for reasons out of their control, cops claim a clearance anyway via the ECA.
But, of course, in the real world, cops will claim a person arrested is responsible for dozens or hundreds of similar crimes, but by using the dodge that prosecutors won't charge load, take ECA clearances for all of the dogs in the open folder that otherwise will never get solved.
My personal experience, and a gross miscarriage, but very common I suspect: In December, when the end of the year was approaching, the commander of the Homicide Unit will have any detective with even minmal probably cause go ahead and arrest, so the department could claim credit for a clearance. This was in spite of the fact that every single such case was destined to be dismissed at preliminary hearings, since the case could not be sustained at that time. And, of course, this started the speedy trial clock ticking, so that almost all of the cases were foreclosed in 180 days. So the involved unit could then claim an inflated and false clearance rate - because arrests count, even if they were destined for dismissal almost immediately. This practice also caused potentially innocent people to be charged with murder, creating a generally permanent record of that arrest, when the evidence was shaky, to say the least.
And in big cities (possibly small ones too), people call the police to report, say, a burglary. The cop who responds doesn't feel like writing a report about a crime that will never be investigated or solved, and thus, he feels a waste of his time, so the cop talks the people out of a report, by claiming it will take days for crime scene people to respond and the house/business cannot be cleaned up until then, or by exaggerating the travails of appearing in court (no small matter, truthfully). People often have no respect for cops anyway, and generally decide "So what? Let's move on."
The entire concept of accurate crime reporting, accurate clearance rates and arrest data are so politicized and highly inflated/deflated, that they have become meaningless.
JCC