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babylonsister

(171,092 posts) Thu Dec 28, 2017, 11:09 AM Dec 2017

The Administration Claims Crime Is on the Rise. So Why Did the FBI Delete Key Crime Data?

The Administration Claims Crime Is on the Rise. So Why Did the FBI Delete Key Crime Data?
Criminologists say they can’t properly analyze crime trends without the missing data.

Pema Levy
Dec. 28, 2017 6:00 AM

Ten days before Christmas, Attorney General Jeff Sessions held a rare press conference to discuss one of his top priorities in his first year at the Justice Department. “We’ve seen a deadly increase in violent crime,” he said, announcing that the department was dispatching 40 additional federal prosecutors across the country to combat what Sessions believes is a dawning new era of violent crime. “The overall violent crime rate is up by nearly 7 percent, a reversal of a downward trend. Robberies are up. Assaults are up. Rape is up by nearly 11 percent. And murder is up by more than 20 percent.” (It’s true that the violent crime rate has ticked up over the past two years, but it’s still barely more than half of what it was 15 years ago.)

The administration’s focus on crime made it all the more surprising that the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States report, the gold standard of crime statistics, lacked a significant amount of data that experts have relied upon for years to assess crime trends. Until this year, the report contained 81 main tables that allowed researchers to track everything from the rate of violent crime to the racial breakdown of arrests. But when the 2016 report came out in September, there were only 29 tables. The information needed to understand and verify the crime stats cited by the attorney general, as well as the work of local law enforcement around the country, was suddenly harder to obtain.

The decision to remove the data hampers the ability of criminologists and journalists to analyze crime trends at the same time that the administration is transforming the justice system to respond to rising violent crime rates. There’s little clarity on why and when the decision to withhold the data was made, although the FBI has claimed the move was part of a years-long process to revamp how it collects and disseminates crime data to the public. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel earlier this month that the missing tables will be added back into the latest report. But beyond 2016, it remains uncertain whether researchers will have access to all these critical crime data.

One of the main areas drastically cut back in the 2016 report was data on homicides. The report no longer contained information on the relationship between the victim and culprit, making it harder to track intimate partner and family violence. Data that would allow researchers to analyze gang- and drug-related homicides was likewise missing. The report did not include information on victim and offender age, sex, race, or ethnicity, nor did it specify which weapons were used in which circumstances. The FBI removed significant information on arrests, reducing the number of arrest tables from 51 to seven, according to FiveThirtyEight. Also gone is a breakdown of drug arrests by type of narcotic, preventing researchers from observing trends in arrests for opioids, a national health crisis that the Trump administration has made a priority.
The information needed to understand and verify the crime stats cited by the attorney general was suddenly harder to obtain.

In response to the missing data, the Crime & Justice Research Alliance, a group that represents the policy interests of thousands of criminologists, sent a letter to Sessions, Wray, and several members of Congress with oversight responsibilities for the Justice Department, asking for the missing data to be added back into the report. “Given this administration’s public statements about addressing violent crime, victims’ rights, the opioid epidemic and terrorism, it is unfortunate that the 2016 report removes key data about these topic areas,” the letter stated. The data deletions, the letter concluded, “mean that progress on critical Administration priorities, such as reducing gang and drug-related homicides, cannot be evaluated with up-to-date evidence.”

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/the-administration-claims-crime-is-on-the-rise-so-why-did-the-fbi-delete-key-crime-data/