Arizona crime rates released (2000-2010)

I find it interesting that the rates of violent crime in Arizona have been increasing so dramatically in the past two years. Since 2009, though, the rates of felons being sent to prison for violent crimes actually dropped.  Sounds to me like either the prosecutors and judiciary have gone soft on rapists and murderers, or - more likely - the cops are just too busy raiding worksites and chasing immigrants to pay attention to solving the crimes that really matter here...that might explain the MCSO's poor performance in recent years in this respect (their murders are down, but how's their clearance rate these days?).

-------------from the AZ Republic------------

Arizona eclipses U.S. in 10-year crime dip, analysis says

by Bob Ortega - Oct. 12, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Despite recent increases in the rates of murder and rape, over the past 10 years, Arizona's reported crime rate has dropped by nearly a third, according to a new analysis of FBI crime data released Tuesday by the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission.

The 32.4 percent decrease in reported crime easily outpaced the 18.9 percent nationwide drop over the same time period. The biggest single driver of Arizona's decline was a 60 percent drop in the rate of motor-vehicle thefts from 2000 to 2010.

Although the rates of most reported crimes fell more sharply than the national average over the decade, Arizona's rate for each of the seven types of crime in the FBI index remains above the national median.

The crimes tracked include four categories of violent crime (murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and three property crimes (burglary, larceny theft and motor-vehicle theft).

The analysis shows that, recently, Arizona's rates of murder, rape and aggravated assault have increased.

Arizona's rate of rape, after falling for four straight years, shot up 31.9 percent from 2008 to last year. That jump led the rate to climb by 10.4 percent over the decade, even as the national rate fell by 14.1 percent.

The justice-commission report does not attribute the rise to any particular cause. But that jump in reported rapes doesn't necessarily mean there has actually been an increase in rapes, said Dean Kilpatrick, director of the National Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center, in Charleston, S.C.

Because rape is so underreported - fewer than one in five victims contacts the police, he said - a successful program to encourage victims to step forward may increase the percentage of rapes that are reported, whether the actual number of rapes is rising, falling or flat.

"If you have good rape-crisis centers, if the police are seen as giving victims a fair shake, better counseling and advocacy, you may get an increase in reporting because victims feel they'll be treated well," he said.

The Phoenix Police Department can't say why the rate is up, said Sgt. Trent Crump, a spokesman. But, he said, in recent years, the department has worked hard to improve cooperation among police, prosecutors, rape counselors and victims advocates.

"We have a forensic-nursing program now to make the examinations less stressful for victims, and we're doing everything we can do to create an environment in which victims feel comfortable coming forward," he said.

Myra Ferell-Womochil, director of community-based services for the Northland Family Help Center in Flagstaff, said the Flagstaff police also have worked hard to educate officers on how to handle sexual-assault cases.

She said education programs run across the state by Arizona's Department of Health Services that teach about consent, healthy relationships and rape prevention may be helping. And, because alcohol use is often a factor, her center has worked with bar owners to educate staff on making bars safer.

The sex-assault statutes in Arizona and most other states don't track precisely with the FBI's definition of rape as "the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will," said Phil Stevenson, the director of the commission's Statistical Analysis Center.

The FBI includes attempted rape using force or the threat of force but doesn't include sex assaults on males, statutory rape or other sex offenses. The FBI is reviewing its definition of rape and will consider changes to it this fall, according to the bureau's Criminal Justice Information Service.

Crump said that in up to 75 percent of the sexual-assault cases in Phoenix, the victim and assailant know each other. "We don't want people to automatically assume these are stranger attacks," he said. "We don't currently have a serial rapist hitting an area."

Arizona's murder rate over the 10 years fell 12.7 percent. But from 2009 to 2010, the rate increased 18.5 percent. At 6.4 murders per 100,000 people last year, Arizona's rate remained one-third higher than the national rate of 4.8 per 100,000.

Crump noted that the 2009 murder rate of five per 100,000 residents was the lowest in more than 20 years. Even the 2010 rate is lower than any year from 2000 to 2007.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said that, in his jurisdiction, murders and rapes are both down so far this year compared with this point last year, with eight murders in 2011 compared with 26 up to this point in 2010.

"We had a lot of our murders in the desert. One reason in our area we're not getting so many murders is the drop in illegal immigration," he said.

The rates of aggravated assaults and robberies both fell by roughly a quarter over the decade, giving Arizona an overall drop in the rate of violent crime of more than 23 percent.

From 2009 to 2010, the rate of aggravated assaults rose 4.5 percent. Property crimes fell more sharply - 33.3 percent - led by a 30.2 percent drop in larceny theft, which includes shoplifting, pickpocketing and the theft of bicycles, and the dramatic plunge in motor-vehicle theft.

The drop in vehicle crime can be credited to a decade-old change in how the state tackled that crime, said Brian Salata, executive director of the Arizona Automobile Theft Authority. Previously, few thieves were aggressively prosecuted.

"All we were doing was knocking off low-level players and not really solving the problem," Salata said.

In 2002, Arizona's vehicle-theft rate was nearly 2 1/2 times the national average. Counties agreed to assign specially trained prosecutors to deal with vehicle-theft cases, and they began pushing harder for thieves to roll over against others in their organizations to get plea bargains, Salata said.

That made it easier to cripple theft rings and criminal cartels, he said. By requiring anyone reporting a vehicle theft to sign a sworn affidavit, cities and counties slashed cases of insurance fraud. Improvements in vehicle security also helped.

While Arizona's vehicle-theft rate was still 40.9 percent higher than the national median last year, Salata said the rate is continuing to drop this year.

Harm-Reduction = Crime-Reduction: Zimring on NYC.

Franklin Zimring is a great researcher, and has done some excellent work on juvenile justice and the death penalty. Note that NYC brought crime down through harm-reduction strategies, not mass incarceration, as Arizona prosecuting attorneys argue the solution is (the Fischer Report is nonsense)...We really need someone like this guy to check out the integrity of our own crime reporting stats more often.

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‘Cheerful News’ on Crime Data and the Integrity Thereof

By AL BAKER

New York Times Blogs
February 3, 2011, 3:40 pm

The three panelists Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly tapped to evaluate the integrity of his department’s crime-recording system will be visited on Friday by a longtime academic, author and criminologist: Prof. Franklin E. Zimring of the University of California, Berkeley.

Why — some right-leaning law and order types might wonder — would a trio of Kelly appointees, former federal prosecutors all, seek out the wisdom of an academic from the West Coast? Simple: The professor has already carried out what one police official called “a pretty remarkable” analysis of the city’s historic crime decline. A draft of his findings (see also below) will be published in Scientific American in the fall, with a book to follow.

(The 38-page draft of the article was distributed by the New York Police Department’s public relations arm, which tickled the professor, who voted in 1972 for Senator George S. McGovern for president.)

The book — working title: “The City That Became Safe: What New York Can Teach America About Crime Control” (Oxford University Press) — has been years in the works. Professor Zimring relied on police statistics, and he had cooperation from the department’s hierarchy. He studied crime in three categories: homicides, robberies and automobile thefts. And he compared data from across the last two decades.

In a nutshell, his findings are that the crime drops depicted in the police statistics are, as Professor Zimring put it, “real.”

“The crime trends you get off the official data are trustworthy in the three cases where we could check them,” he said. “What that does not mean is that the number of thefts the New York City Police Department reports is the number of thefts that citizens have experienced in the city. There is not a ‘CompStat-effect’ that makes the problem much worse than 1994.”

He added: “The degree of underreporting, which I regard as a chronic condition in all police-generated data, is no greater now than it was 20 years ago, and probably, if you look at the robbery indicators, a little better now than it was then — and not measurably greater in this city than in other cities.”

Translation of Professor Zimring’s findings: Police data are always a bit loose, but no more so in New York than elsewhere or at other times; the department’s CompStat program, a computerized mapping system that tracks crime patterns, created tensions right from its inception, with police commanders ridiculing underlings at the twice-weekly sessions at the department’s 1 Police Plaza headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The overall news about crime being down is “not only big news,” Professor Zimring said, “but enormously cheerful news.”

The professor also concluded from his research that large numbers of criminals have stopped committing serious crimes. And he looked deeply at how the police in New York have successfully fought the war on drugs — essentially, by going into the “harm-reduction business,” where a principal aim was to make the streets safer and increase people’s confidence in using agencies.

So successful has the effort been, Professor Zimring said, that the narcotics squads in the city that were beefed up through the 1990s now have smaller staffs than in 1990.

As his paper says, one surprise from the city’s experience is that “the city made giant strides toward solving its crime problem without either winning its war on illicit drug use or massive increases in incarceration.”

“So,” it continues, “the great success in this city is a challenge to the two dominant assumptions of crime control policy in modern America.”

With regard to numbers, Professor Zimring truth-tested the police statistics with independent data. He compared the Police Department’s murder rates with municipal health records. He compared the department’s reporting of a “spectacular drop” in auto theft over the last two decades with theft loss reports from insurance-industry data bureaus.

“So the biggest decrease (auto theft) and the most important decrease (homicide) are both confirmed by independent sources,” Professor Zimring wrote. “And, there is confirmation as well for the big drop in robbery, because the number of killings from robberies dropped more than the 84 percent decline in non-fatal robberies.”

In an interview, Mr. Zimring expanded on his methodology of using independent sources — data the police could “not have fudged” — to confirm police crime statistics. “In all three cases, on the size of the decline and when it happened, I confirmed it,” he said. “I was a little bit surprised with that.”

He added: “That does not say there is no fudging; of course, there is fudging. There is fudging everywhere.” However, he added, the statistical measures of the declines in the three areas he studied seem clearly to survive an audit.

So, what does Professor Zimring plan to tell Mr. Kelly’s panel?

“First of all, I am going to tell them what I am not an expert on is the mechanics of the crime-reporting phenomenon,” he said. “I will then take them through what I did to assess trends and talk about what that does say and what it does not say.” And then, talk to them about what some of the dilemmas in crime reporting are.

That includes a discussion of what he called a “completely garbage category” — larceny — and “a second junk category,” assault.

“I think that police accountability is a very good thing,” Professor Zimring said. “And I don’t think the police should be in a ‘Love us or leave us’ position: ‘If anything we do works, then you have to approve of everything we do.’ That is not the way we run democracies and not the way we should run police departments. But what concerns me is, people should focus on the enormously important changes that have taken place.”...

Zimring Journal Article