A 15-year-old girl was recently beaten and robbed in front of three Seattle bus station security guards. As you can see, in the video below, the guards do virtually nothing to stop the violence, even as the attacked girl runs to them for help. According to the news sources, the guards were contract workers who were not authorized to use any force or stop any illegal act from happening—in fact, prohibited from doing so. They’re only duty was to “observe and report” crime.

This incident makes me wonder if these privately-employed individuals should even have the appearance of law enforcement, when they cannot enforce laws or protect individuals from harm. Giving them the appearance of law enforcement officers, with uniforms, hats, bright yellow jackets (as in the video), and large radios or flashlights only serves to lull us into a false sense of security.

If security guards can only provide a perception of security—not actual security— officially-dressed security guards might even pose a greater threat to us than if they simply wore civilian clothing. For example, in the video you can see the girl run toward the security officers and try to hide behind them, thinking they would protect her. That pause gave the attackers the ability to grab her. If the security guards were not so obviously dressed, the victim would not have seen them and kept on running, possibly fleeing her attackers altogether.

I suppose the problem here is that when security guards dress like law enforcement, the public puts trust in them, but that trust is misplaced. That misplaced trust can have dangerous consequences, as this teenage girl found out.

Law enforcement officers: What do you think? Do civilian security guards help or harm citizens by dressing like officers?

Security guards: How does the way you dress affect the way you do your job?

James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.

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There has been much criticism from the right and left of the President’s new budget. But regardless of the political bombs being thrown back and forth, the administration saw fit to provide US law enforcement with over $100 in grants for anti-crime and crime prevention, including funds for “smart” probation programs and programs aimed at treating and assisting children who have been the victims or witnesses of violence. These funds go along with the Obama administration’s focus on improving the civil rights enforcement and developing effective offender reentry programs.

Part of the funds will also be used in early-intervention programs for children, seeking to prevent crime before it happens. A North Carolina news network recently did a story on just such a program. Watch the video after the jump.

James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.

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Around the beginning of the New Year, many law enforcement agencies take stock of the things that occurred in the previous year. Oft times in January, police chiefs around the country will ask their crime analysts for a preliminary work up of the crime statistics so they can get an advance look at the numbers. Then around mid-year, the FBI will begin to issue preliminary crime statistics and eventually the Uniform Crime Report will be released. The issuance of the Uniform Crime Report will start a flurry of stories in the news about crime statistics, and an equally frantic run on antacids by the heads of law enforcement agencies.

But instead of looking at crime stats as just another reason for the local media to make your Chief’s life miserable, we need to see them as a tool to help us improve our agency’s operations. There’s a great quote attributed to the American jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes that says:

“In order to understand what is, we must know what has been, and what it tends to become.”

Crime statistics help you to understand what is going on in your community by measuring what has happened, and by projecting where you are headed.

How Crimes Are Counted

Back in the 1920’s and 30’s, law enforcement made great strides in professionalization. The International Association of Chiefs of Police made an effort to encourage law enforcement to collect detailed statistics on crime in their jurisdictions. By the 1930’s, they had convinced Congress of the value in this and the FBI was made the clearinghouse for the data collected under the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) program.

Every month, law enforcement agencies compile statistics on crimes reported to the police in their jurisdiction and send the information to their state’s designee. In Texas, we send our crime data to the Texas Department of Public Safety. They in turn, collect the rest of the state’s crime data and send it to the FBI’s UCR program.

UCR is divided into two parts, Part 1 Crimes and Part 2 Crimes. It’s the Part 1 Crimes that are usually what people are talking about when crime stats are published and the stories start making the news. UCR Part 1 Crimes are:

• Murder
• Rape
• Robbery
• Aggravated Assault
• Burglary
• Larceny-Theft
• Motor Vehicle Theft
• Arson

While these aren’t every possible type of crime, they are a pretty good representative sample of both violent and non-violent crimes.

The biggest shortcoming in the UCR program is that the UCR program counts crimes reported to the police. Many crimes are never reported to the police for one reason or another. In fact, the results of a recent study detailed by the Police Foundation indicated that nearly 50% of the crime types studied were never reported to the police.

To counter this trend of under-reporting, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) attempts to fill in the gaps. For the most part though, the data obtained in the NCVS doesn’t make news like UCR data does. It’s also not as well used by law enforcement agencies as UCR. Part of the reason might be that it’s hard to hold a police agency accountable for solving crimes that are never reported to them. The most important thing that law enforcement agencies can take away from the NCVS is that under-reporting of crime is prevalent and to examine their agency’s processes and remove as many barriers to reporting crimes as possible.

Cautions

One common use of UCR data is to take the data and to compare one city to another. In fact, about the time UCR data is published you’ll see a number of folks issuing press releases with their lists of “safest” cities. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this simplistic approach to ranking cities. In fact, this blood sport has gotten so common that the FBI puts this (or a similar) caveat on nearly every UCR publication:

Each year when Crime in the United States is published, many entities—news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation—use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.

The link to the article Variables Affecting Crime from where this quote was taken has a great explanation of why this simplistic approach to ranking cities is shortsighted. I encourage you to hit the link and read the whole article.

What Are They Good For Then?

If not every crime gets reported to the police, and even when they are, every community is different, what good are crime stats? The answer to this question lies in holding ourselves accountable. In fact, this accountability is a large part of the CompStat process that has become so common in American law enforcement. In fact, the name CompStat is a contraction of Computer Statistics. Many believe that when properly implemented, the CompStat process has led to lower crime rates in those cities.

A recent article in Police Chief magazine describes CompStat this way.

CompStat pushes all precincts to generate weekly crime activity reports so that they can be held accountable for the achievement of several objectives. Crime data are readily available, offering up-to-date information that is then compared at citywide, patrol, and precinct levels. Instead of simply responding to crime, commanders begin thinking proactively about ways to deal with it in terms of suppression, intervention, and prevention; commanders also must explain what tactics they have employed to address crime patterns, what resources they have and need, and with whom they have collaborated.

It may not be valid to compare my city’s crime statistics with another city, but I can compare my city’s stats from last year to the year before, or better yet, from last month to the previous month. What areas did you do better? What areas were worse? This isn’t the end of your analysis but just the beginning.

Scott Dickson is a crime analyst in Killeen, Texas. He blogs at The Crime Analyst’s Blog and can be reached via email at scott@crimeanalystblog.net

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I just got the numbers, and it looks like CrimeReports mapped over 10,000,000 crimes across North America in 2009, ranging from serious and violent offenses to petty misdemeanors. The number one mapped crime for 2009—unsurprisingly—is traffic violations.

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Public humiliation as a creative punishment for criminals is not a new thing. In fact, it’s almost a regular feature on our companion blog, The Neighborhood Crime Map (as you can see here, here, and here). Creative sentencing is usually brought about as an alternative to a harsher sentence. In this case, it appears to be in lieu of deportation, but the public humiliation of this woman is also being used as a way to inform the general public about police officer assaults. Watch the video below and leave you thoughts in the comments section.

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Each year the federal government gives out billions of dollars in grants to state and local law enforcement agencies that go toward programs like crime prevention, prisoner release programs, community-oriented policing, and more. NPR reports that during the Bush administration, many criticized the way that these grants were handed out, calling for investigation into nepotism and practices that essentially eliminated competition for government grants.

The Obama administration has been more transparent about grant information, publishing a weekly list of grant recipients; however, the appearance of transparency doesn’t necessarily translate into total transparency, as Ari Shapiro of NPR points out.

The public may now be able to see the recipients without a having to request records through the Freedom of Information Act, but the competition process is still behind closed doors.

Listen to the complete story here: http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/wesat/2010/01/20100102_wesat_14.mp3?dl=1

Is this transparency making the government more ethical in it’s awarding of grants? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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CGISC map of water service in the Coal Run neighborhood

It may come as no surprise to law enforcement that low-income neighborhoods generally have more crime than higher-income areas. A recent analysis done by IndyStar.com found that, in Indianapolis,

The poorer the neighborhood, the more likely a home is to be the target of an armed break-in. And if a neighborhood is heavily Hispanic, home invasions are even more frequent.

“They aren’t going into affluent neighborhoods and picking houses at random; we don’t see that,” said Robert Holt, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s North District commander. “Most of the time they know something about the person living there or what’s inside.”

Defying logic, however, government money is less likely to be sent to these areas. For example, The Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities did an analysis of Zanesville, Ohio, using municipal maps of water lines and government spending to show that in the Coal Run neighborhood—overwhelmingly—higher-income, white homes had better-maintained water systems and lower-income, black homes had less water service—if they had water service at all.

If you are a proponent of the “broken windows” philosophy, you understand that often it is the little things in a neighborhood that will raise the likelihood that crime will occur in a neighborhood. In a nutshell, small signs of decay, like a number of broken windows and graffiti, send a message to criminals that “this neighborhood does not take pride in itself, no one cares, and no one is watching.” If a neighborhood sends that message, it is no wonder that criminals move in or choose to terrorize its residents.

Instead of blaming residents of low-income neighborhoods for their own plight, it might make sense to funnel some money toward municipal maintenance and other projects in that direction. When a neighborhood appears to be clean and safe, criminals won’t want to be there.

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Here is another set of two videos that ran last night in Houston and Denton, Texas, on the ABC and CW affiliates, respectively. But I’ll let the videos do the talking.

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What did your chief give you this Christmas? The Kenosha, Wis., Police Department has put together their own version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” that features, jelly donnuts, bullets, untrained rookies, and more. These guys obviously had a good time spreading Christmas cheer. And the hope you will feel it too.

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In order to effectively deal with a social problem, one must first begin with a clear understanding of the problem at hand. Often times this requires not only a frank discussion, but also the willingness to put aside long held beliefs based on “common sense” or anecdotal evidence in favor of empirical evidence. Take for example a familiar social problem whose eradication has mostly been sought through the imposition of criminal penalties: the drug problem.

Gut Reactions

Most people’s first reaction to the statement “marijuana should be legalized” is strong and instinctual:  No, drugs are bad. This is understandable as the criminal justice system, school system, and nearly every other institution by which one is socialized have long been indoctrinating the public about the general evils of drugs, some of which are indisputable. Certainly drug use can and does result in harm not only towards the user but also towards his or her family, friends, and community. However, upon probing further for reasons why marijuana should not be legalized, many can’t get past the “It’s just wrong” mentality; when they do, they begin to cite “common sense” information that simply isn’t true: marijuana is an addictive gateway drug.

Marijuana Misinformation

Much of what the public knows, and what the government puts forward, about marijuana is simply incorrect. Not only is marijuana not physically addictive, but even its psychological addiction appears to be less than that of heroin, cocaine, nicotine, alcohol or caffeine. In addition, marijuana is less lethal than nearly every other drug: it is estimated that a user would need to smoke nearly 100 pounds of marijuana a minute for 15 minutes to produce a lethal overdose. The average lethal dose of acetaminophen, however, is 7.5 grams for an adult or 15 extra strength tablets.

Other harms attributed to marijuana use are also overstated and frequently go unquestioned despite the wide variety of credible sources refuting them. One of the earliest studies about the ill effects of marijuana was conducted in 1894 by the Indian Hemp Commission. They concluded that while some heavy users did develop bronchitis, moderate use appeared to produce no ill health effects, findings which have since been echoed by The Lancet, the leading British medical journal.

The reported links to violent behavior among marijuana users and the “gateway” status of the drug also appear to be invalid. In 1944, after extensive probing, the LaGuardia Commission, and many others since, found that marijuana is not a gateway drug whose use directly leads to the use of other harsher illicit drugs; marijuana use it not a major cause of other crimes; marijuana use is not addictive in the medical sense of the term; the publicity surrounding the ‘catastrophic effects’ of marijuana in NYC is unfounded. That same year the New York Academy of Medicine reported that marijuana does not produce “violent behavior, provoke insanity, lead to addiction or promote opiate use.”

Reactionary Drug Laws

Commissions appointed by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson also renounced claims that there was a direct link between marijuana use and violent crime and marijuana use and heroin use. President Nixon’s bipartisan 1972 National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse concluded that marijuana possession should be decriminalized under both federal and state law. In 1977, even the Drug Enforcement Agency noted that marijuana should be decriminalized. A mere three years later, however, marijuana somehow became the most urgent drug problem in the United States. In 1981 Congressman Newt Gingrich introduced a bill to legalize medical marijuana. Fifteen years later, as Speaker of the House, he sponsored legislation proposing a life sentence or the death penalty for anyone who brought more than two ounces of marijuana into the US.

So which is it? Is marijuana use a crime worthy of a life sentence or worthy of decriminalization? Is marijuana a highly addictive drug or merely psychologically addictive? Is marijuana a gateway drug whose use leads to a life of illicit drugs and violent crime? More importantly, if these two commonly held assertions are false, what else is?

Look for part 2 of this article in two weeks: Toward a Smart Drug Policy: Pt. 2—Informed and Balanced Laws

Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Meridith Spencer is an adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at Bridgewater State College and Fisher College and an advocate for public policy that is “smart on crime.” She can be reached at meras28@gmail.com.

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