FBI Crime Stats Might Help McCarthy's 'Perception' Issue

By Chris Bentley in News on Jun 20, 2012 7:20PM

Chicago’s murder rate is up this year, but according to Police Supt. Garry McCarthy recent efforts to turn that trend around are working. So how should we perceive crime in Chicago?

Preliminary data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) for 2011, released June 11, show a 4 percent drop in violent crime nationwide. Chicago did not appear in the inevitable “top 10 most dangerous cities” media lists. But there are at least two problems with touting Chicago’s absence from such lists as a victory for public safety.

First, the report omits an overall violent crime figure for Chicago (and Rochester, Minn.) because Chicago reports criminal sexual assault, a broader category than the "forcible rape" figure used in this report.

The FBI's definition of “forcible rape” ("rape rape" as The Daily Show's Kristen Schaal put it) “excludes statutory rape (without force) and other sex offenses.“ Between March 2010 and March 2011 there were 1,349 reported incidents of criminal sexual assault in Chicago. In 2009 that number was 1,443. In the past 12 months, CPD statistics show there were 1,416 reported cases of criminal sexual assault.

So if roughly half of those sexual assaults contributed to the city's overall violent crime rate, Chicago would rank 29th for overall violent crime per capita.

The second thing to consider is population. Of cities with population over 100,000, Flint, Mich. tops the list. But filtering out smaller cities provides a different perspective. Chicago ranks 7th for violent crime among cities larger than 500,000 residents and 2nd in cities with population over 1 million. (Detroit tops the former list; Philadelphia the latter.)

It’s important to remember these rankings are based in part on our figure of 700 forcible rapes, which was rather arbitrarily taken from the roughly 1,400 criminal sexual assaults reported in Chicago over each of the past three years. That rate is comparable to the number of forcible rapes reported in Houston or Las Vegas last year.

The FBI itself cautions against weighing UCR rankings too heavily. More than 18,000 law enforcement jurisdictions contribute data to the program, each with a unique cocktail of factors — from climate to transportation infrastructure — that influence the crime rate.

Each factor is an open research question for criminologists and journalists. Whet Moser found non-winter weekends averaged 4.9 murders, using RedEye’s weekend crime roundup data for March-October since 2007. There didn’t appear to be any striking correlation to weather on those weekends with a lot of violence.

No matter how you slice it, crime has an all too real cost for those who experience it first-, second- or even third-hand. And the cash-strapped city would benefit financially from peace — violent crime costs Chicago about $5.3 billion per year, according to a new study by the Center for American Progress.