Top 10 Cities w/ the most break-ins - 3 are in Texas

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by Texascrude

I'd agree that it is largely a product of the zoning, or lack there of. One of the disadvantages of living in a big and "diverse" city.

Please explain what high crime due to lack of zoning has to do with diversity

[karuna95]

Like previous posters said, absolute numbers presented this way is not illuminating. We might have more crime because we have lots more people. To be meaningful, the data needs to be shown as # of events per 100,000 people. Then we can compare with other cities in an equitable manner.
What IS interesting is that the top 4 most populous metropolitan areas in 2010 Census are:

1. NYC area
2. LA area
3. Chicago area
4. Dallas-FtW area
5. Philadelphia area
6. Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land area

so based on just #s alone, Houston should be #6, not #1. So it looks like Houston, we DO have a problem.

[Zhang Fei]

Wikipedia ranking of large cities (>250K population) with respect to burglary rates per 100K population:




Note that the FBI statistics are self-reported by the local PD's, which have every incentive to fudge their numbers given that promotions are dependent on achieving targets based on those numbers. A sampling from the PoliceOne website:

1.) In 1996, there was a concerted effort to conceal the magnitude of crime in Atlanta during the Summer Olympics selection process. An audit in 2003 revealed that 22,000 crimes were left out of reports for the previous year.

2.) In 1998, Philadelphia PD was the subject of a DOJ investigation into under-reporting crime. The practice endured, top commanders said, because favorable statistics made higher-ups happy and helped careers.

3.) In April 2000 U.S. News and World Report stated that “facing political heat to cut crime in the city, investigators in the [Philadelphia] PD Sex Crime Unit sat on (thousands of) reports of rapes and other sexual assaults.” Captain Rich Costello, President of the FOP said, “The way crime was solved was with an eraser.”

4.) In 2003, four New Orleans officers and a district commander were fired for downgrading hundreds of serious crimes to “miscellaneous incidents.” The department had been giving quarterly and annual "crime reduction awards" to districts that posted the greatest declines in major crime. The fired district commander had won the award for the entire previous year and the first quarter of 2003. The investigation began with anonymous tips from officers frustrated with the aggressive use of statistics as a performance measure.

5.) In 2004, the NYPD police unions publicly charged that the department had cooked the books to lower crime stats and called on its members to share evidence of crimes being downgraded. Management countered that the unions advanced the charge to gain advantage in contract negotiations.

6.) In 2005, four Broward County Deputy Sheriffs were fired for fudging crime stats. Denying any knowledge, the Sheriff used the false stats to convince municipalities to scrap their own police departments and contract with the BSO. He also used the stats in his political rise. An investigation revealed cover ups by BSO supervisors as well as pressures on front line officers to down-grade crimes or only charge one crime to a suspect who had admitted dozens.

7.) In 2010, more than half of 309 retired NYPD officers admitted to fudging crime stats in a survey conducted by two academicians from Molloy and John Jay Colleges. Most of the respondents served as precinct commanders after CompStat was implemented. They reported heavy pressure from higher-ups to reduce felonies to misdemeanors or to not report crimes at all to make the numbers look prettier.

8.) Fudged crime stats hit pop culture status with HBO’s acclaimed series The Wire. Based on the Baltimore PD, one of the shows central themes was the pressure politicians put on police brass, who pass it on to the department’s middle management, to generate PR-friendly statistics about lowering crime and increasing arrests.

[Dopo]

The city of St. Louis is only "downtown" which accounts for about 10% of the population of St. Louis metro area.

[Zhang Fei]

I have heard it said that criminal homicides are the hardest thing to skew, perhaps because bodies in the morgue are difficult to hide, due to mandatory medical examiner reports, and perhaps politically the most disastrous stat to be caught fudging. Ultimately, the most important stat is probably the criminal homicide rate, since possessions can be replaced, whereas the resuscitation of homicide victims remains outside the capabilities of today's medical science.