"RMDumse" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Oct 21, 4:47 pm, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
There's an inconvenient truth for ya', huh?
Or an convenient lie.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...s.37a0d0d.html
"Until this week, it seemed likely that Dallas would remain No. 1. But
the Police Department has discovered it hasn't been following FBI
guidelines, resulting in the overreporting of certain crimes.
"In some cases, the rules allow multiple crimes to be reported as a
single act. For example, 10 car break-ins committed by the same
burglar within a few minutes of one another count as one criminal act.
Dallas was reporting 10 crimes."
Or maybe not. It could be just NYC is better at covering up its
statistics than Dallas is. However, I know for a fact Dallas tries to
do the same, at least in one case I've already sighted.
Randy
You stopped your "research" too soon, Randy:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...e.2ee1bc8.html
===============================================
"Revised crime stats won't help Dallas' highest ranking"
"Police grouping some multiple crimes, but improved numbers aren't enough"
05:30 AM CDT on Thursday, August 16, 2007
By TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News
Recent changes in the way Dallas reports crime probably won't be enough to
knock the city from its perch as the most crime-ridden major city in
America, police officials said Wednesday.
Archive: Dallas has worst crime in nation
Last month, Dallas police said they had been incorrectly reporting some
crimes for years to the FBI. The guidelines allow multiple crimes to be
reported as a single criminal act when reporting some property crimes, and
Dallas hadn't been consistently using the rule.
In initial reviews, police re-examined vehicle burglaries, robberies,
shoplifting and other thefts from January through June, which led the Police
Department to reduce the number of those offenses by 1,723.
Extrapolating that number over a whole year would mean theoretically cutting
about 3,400 offenses - far less than the almost 14,000 offenses that would
have had to have been eliminated in 2006 to avoid being ranked No. 1 in
crime among cities with more than 1 million residents.
===============================================
As I said before, I've spent a lot of hours with the FBI UCR. I also read
both of those stories before posting my earlier comments. Don't be so quick
to call something a "lie" until you've done your homework. And keep in mind
that the figure I quoted is *actual reported crimes*, as I said. There was
no "mistake" in the Dallas Police Department's original reporting. The
mistake was in following the UCR guidelines for ganging up crimes reported.
And it turned out to be an inconsequential mistake.
The theory you were posing before, that the "Great Men" are protecting our
neighborhoods with guns, isn't holding up upon close examination, is it? New
York City, with 1/6 of your burglary rate, has a very low percentage of gun
owners -- just owning a gun there at all requires an onerous process. And if
you really do your homework you'll find that the pattern holds: as I said,
there is no relationship between crime rates and gun ownership in the United
States. I've done the research, in real depth, and I assure you that you
will not find a relationship if you do the study honestly. The anecdotes we
hear from the NRA et al. are trivial compared to the real statistics. A
great deal of the fantasy surrounding your theory is of a nature similar to
the suggestion made by Doug, that killing two burglars can have a
"significant effect" on the crime statistics in a city reporting over 21,000
total burglaries. I'll be generous and say it's the result of careless
research and wishful thinking.
There are some real pestholes of crime in the US, Randy, and sticking to
"principles," arming yourself to the teeth and cheering when the occasional
criminal gets shot, isn't going to change the size of the threat.
--
Ed Huntress