"This is the highest error rate I have ever heard of," said Samuel Walker, criminology professor at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. "A genuinely independent audit of the department is necessary."Barrett, you will remember, was the Democratic Party's candidate in the recall election against Scott Walker.
Mayor Tom Barrett praised the department for being transparent about flaws in crime data.
"While there were errors in total crimes reported to the FBI, the Police Department's analysis shows crime trends previously reported are correct," Barrett said. "Milwaukee is a safer city."
June 21, 2012
"More than 5,300 violent assaults have been misreported since 2006..." in Milwaukee.
"An internal department audit shows that 20% of aggravated assaults were underreported as lesser offenses that didn't get counted in the city's violent crime rate during that time."
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Why, Ann. It just may be that the Democrat was corrupt as hell. There is a big difference between the way the press, the police, and liberals seem to treat corrupt Democrats and corrupt Republicans.
There also seem to be a lot more of the Democrats.
That could be connected.
State and Federal jobs and crime stats are increasingly suspect. That is, they are often pure bullshit.
What could possibly go wrong?
"While there were errors in total crimes reported to the FBI, the Police Department's analysis shows crime trends previously reported are correct," Barrett said.
Snork. hehehehehe... that's the analysis from the same PD that screwed with the records in the first place, but IT'S obviously correct...
Why yes, I'm VERY damned cynical about such anymore. Plus, this just flat sucks.
We were honest about our dishonesty.
"While there were errors in total crimes reported to the FBI, the Police Department's analysis shows crime trends previously reported are correct," Barrett said. "Milwaukee is a safer city."
Well, maybe so. But fudging the data like that makes the city look a hell of a lot safer than it is in absolute terms, and it prevents people from saying things like "you're more likely to get a beatdown in Milwaukee than in Baghdad what the hell is the mayor doing anyway".
We may want to revisit that word, "safer".
Another non-surprise.
I hate being so cynical.
State and Federal jobs and crime stats are increasingly suspect. That is, they are often pure bullshit.
I think this is true in most countries. A friend of mine was assaulted in London, and when she went to report it they basically told her they didn't have time to look into it anyway so there's no point in filing a report. They did everything they could to dissuade her short of refusing outright. You see, crime doesn't make them look bad, but a lot of reports on crime does make them look bad.
Are they covering up something? Were crimes under reported disproportionately by race?
Man, this ain't nothin'! I understand that Walker had a secret router, and he gonna be indicted real soon!
I wonder if one of the most common words found in police reports is "random." (Wink wink)
Once upon a time in Milwaukee we had a true law and order Police Chief in Harold Brier. But, he was politically incorrect in the new era of progressive Milwaukee.
One where it wasn't the criminals fault they did it. It was the fault of society. So we get rid of our law and order guy. And we've had a succession of crappy "feel good" Police chiefs ever since.
I thought Flynn and these improving crime stats were very legit. But unfortunately this puts an entirely new light on things. I can't tell now if Flynn is truly a good cop or just good PR guy.
this is a problem all over. the police departments are rewarded when crime stats go down. so they are under a lot of pressure to make it so.
there is a really good show on "this american life" called 'Right to Remain Silent'.
google it, and listen, you'll be shocked at what goes on.
Pogo: I understand that Walker had a secret router, and he gonna be indicted real soon!
I forgot about that. You're right. Remember just before the election, three allegedly high placed sources claimed a Walker indictment would happen any day?
Scott Walker was never County Executive of Milwaukee County and, er, uh protect the taxpayer! Yea!! Deficits. And Unions too.
That's a Shout Out to the Jethros. Mah peeps.
Nice to see this getting the attention it deserves at a critical time.
Oh, wait.
Barrett, you will remember, was the Democratic Party's candidate in the recall election against Scott Walker.
I don't remember that at all!!!! There must be something wrong with my memory.
Wait -- there was a recall election?
Every big city run by Democrats is doing this. Fact is you can't trust any number the Govt hand out.
Sounds like an episode of Blue Bloods
Who is this Tom Barret?
The thing to remember about politics is that the Politician is always selling protection to the polis; but the polis isn't actually one thing, it's a set of constituencies. So the question to ask is always, which part of the polis has the politician's vitals in a death-grip.
Barret couldn't run against the unions (death-grip!) and he couldn't run with them (losers!)
Running against the death-grip, assuming your sensitive parts aren't in the death-grip, would seem to be a good strategy this time around.
Advantage: Not Establishment.
This expresses the specific thing I admire about Althouse, a quality for which I have always lauded her and will always laud her no matter what--
and no joke nor snark about it.
--
Deleted and re-posted exactly in terms of the original post (just wasn't going to accept that the result of yet another, randomly required Google sign canceled out a very standard requirement of mine w/r/t to commenting.)
And I wonder what color the vast majority of these criminals were....or whom they supported for President in 2008 and this year...
YOUR fault, liberals. May you meet these fine, upstanding Obama voters in a back alley, late one night, with no one else around.
The thing to remember about politics is that the Politician is always selling protection to the polis; but the polis isn't actually one thing, it's a set of constituencies. So the question to ask is always, which part of the polis has the politician's vitals in a death-grip.
Precise. Pithy. Perfect.
Also, exactly right--that is to say, correct. Breathe in, breathe out, see straight.
And yet.. Walker asked people that said people that said his blunder was not sitting down .. to sit down for beer an brawts? .. i forgot how to spell that.
And the response back was not all the governor hoped for..
Looks like they were busy not doing their jobs.. and feeling threatened by a guy who had the temerity to ask them to share in some of the sacrifice their fellow private sector neighbors were allready burdened with.
Who is this Tom Barret?
Better watch what you ask for you may get it.. chicken coming home to roost. yadi yada.
"YOUR fault, liberals".
Meh, whatever. I suspect that not just the likes of you, but YOU specifically, have contributed a good deal to our problems, yet find it convenient to ride on the coattails of others who have not. What a poseur and pisseur de copie.
I suspect that if I knew your details, I would not classify you even as a conservative, much less a libertarian. And I would expect that other people of principle wouldn't either--
--which is not to say that in no way would I be surprised when, in fact, more usually, they fail to do so.
You know, the problem, as I see it, goes beyond what we believe to be already an intolerable situation..
These are the people that tell us our healh care will be better off in their capable hands.
oh yea.. never minds that a federal government.. one which is at least in writing supposedly further away from us than state government.. the one caught here playing fast and loose with.. just putting down on paper what happened.. recording the facts!!
People further removed from these nincompoops will be the ones handling our health care.
Justthought you might like to know that.
Lem:
My attitude toward government is specifically aligned with how close (and by that I mean I mean in terms of space and time: geography + local access) it is to me. That attitude is consistent and it has never changed. I oppose consolidation of government to the national level, and I have despised and do despise the ever-devolving cultural and political trend toward that here in my beloved United States.
Shockingly, no doubt, I say that as what folks might used to have described as a political moderate, but now just have no use for and would dismiss in the most disgusting and contemptuous of terms.
I say: Have at it. (But make no mistake: I have my opinions, as well. And I'd bet I'm more right than most in terms what we've paid into the systems, as opposed to what is being taken from it.)
The formula its fairly simple.. the further away a government is removed from you the less responsive it is to your needs and eventually but inevitably.. the same goes for the citizens at large.
We have.. overtime.. created a leviathan of a government that its #1 concern is its own survival and #2 that it should keep growing.
those two are probably interchangeable.
I just heard on the radio a Democratic response to a possible contempt citation by the US Congress (thats us the people) against the Attorneys General of the United States.. (who suposedly works for us too)
"They (republicans) are going after Holder so as to suppress the black/minorities vote."
Uh huh. But that doesn't mean we have to buy into that, including accepting benefits, even when we could have, if there's any way around that as a first response. I can firmly stand here and say that we made a different choice, despite risk and a great deal of discomfort. Can you? Can most? Have most?
---
Pay not attention to what people *say* w/r/t political+economic principles. Look at they what *do* and *have done* and on what they're depending [on which they are dependent] *personally*.
I just heard on the radio a Democratic response to a possible contempt citation by the US Congress (thats us the people) against the Attorneys General of the United States.. (who suposedly works for us too)
"They (republicans) are going after Holder so as to suppress the black/minorities vote."
Squirrel!
Say, Lem, conservative/libertarian that you are: Are you now in an economic situation that does not involve payments from the government?
While we are told crime is down, we are also told the courts, criminal cases, judges, district attorneys etc are overworked and backlogged. Always seems like a contradiction to me.
1) Incentivize the behavior you wish to encourage.
2) Create a robust system to verify the reporting.
So, the problem is with #1. The behavior we wish out of police departments is more closely aligned with arresting criminals than with lower crime rates, tho arrests and prosecutions should ultimately lower crime. Here, we just had the cops skipping the hard parts, so to speak.
What, garage is calling himself a Republican now?
Somebody get the Haldol.
rcommal said...
I just heard on the radio a Democratic response to a possible contempt citation by the US Congress (thats us the people) against the Attorneys General of the United States.. (who suposedly works for us too)
"They (republicans) are going after Holder so as to suppress the black/minorities vote."
Squirrel!
Say, Lem, conservative/libertarian that you are: Are you now in an economic situation that does not involve payments from the government?
Squirrel, indeed.
(more like Son of Chickenhawk)
How exactly does this nonsense nullify his argument?
AJ Lynch:
I know what you mean. It's a conundrum. It's as if--what?--all those criminals are in pause mode, just waiting to see what sausage gets churned out by the justice system, and to the extent that the system gets bigger and slower and god knows what else, that--in and of itsel--will discourage crime, because all those old criminals and even potential new ones, will continue to be in pause mode, as they wait to to see what newer sausage gets churned out, and ...
so on, and so, and so it goes.
My impression was that if you report a highr crime rate you are ensuring.. check that.. you may increase the ranks.
The only explanation for under reporting (doing something counter intuitive to growth) is that it has to be coming from an entrenched, intractable, inescapable political modus operandi.
if that makes any sense.
Their own survival, as measured in terms of promotions, and a safe pension, is no longer threatened if only by an appearance of success.. which is entirely in their hands because they just make sure to check the right box on the paper work.
Just keep everybody happy..
nothing to see here.. move along.
What I heard on the radio was off topic..
Sorry if I caused some confusion.
I meant to give you guys a heads up on the kind of shit we conservatives/libertarians have to deal with every single day.
and with that i bid you fare well.
" An under-reporting error rate of 20%...
"There is a big difference between a bureaucratic failure and a bureaucratic plot," Flynn said. "There has been a bureaucratic failure"
A horrible, horrible lie. Beneath contempt. But Milwaukee is blue, so nothing will happen.
Oh, the numbers will change, but nothing will actually happen.
So you can't believe the police chief, you have to trust your instincts and watch around you constantly. Would I send my kid to Marquette? Doubtful.
You can paint over the rust on your car, but at some point there ain't any more metal to paint.
This is the adult version of giving everyone a trophy in soccer for first graders.
"bagoh20 said...
Who is this Tom Barret?"
Baby killin' former Democratic candidate for Governor. Duh.
@rcommal said...
"Say, Lem, conservative/libertarian that you are: Are you now in an economic situation that does not involve payments from the government?"
That's crazy talk. Akin to asking him if he uses the roads or sidewalks. Phthth.
Worse, it maligns a man for being victimized by state overspending and overtaxing and over-regulating, which creates and deepens the Depression, costing him employment, and then maligns him again for seeking relief.
I find that a wholly unreasonable argument.
It is instead quite reasonable of those who oppose the New Deal/Progressive statist approach to claw back every cent possible from the state that stole it from your pocket.
The Alinsky tactic of overloading the system in order to crush it/bury it is also not an unreasonable tactic.
crime trends previously reported are correct," Barrett said. "Milwaukee is a safer city."
We believe you!!
Really, we do!
Well, Pogo, all I can say is: "We have met the enemy and he is us." The open question is whether we'll get stuck there or prevail, as in the original missive (only later parodied by Walt Kelly, see above): "...We have met the enemy, and they are ours... ."
; ) : )
Agreed.
Democrat: What war on whites?!?!
Republican: I know nuzzing, nuzzing.
At what point does it stop being an error rate?
A little background on the UCR…
Violent crime statistics are composed of four items – murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault (AA). Taken together, murders, rapes and robberies account for a small fraction of the overall number, with AA dominating the overall percentage. Digging further, the bulk of AA is domestic violence.
Looking nationwide and comparing one Statistical Metropolitan Area (SMA) to another according to the compiled FBI data, you will see a wide variation of “safe” and “violent” areas. This isn’t due to variations in crime, but in how the crimes are reported. In Connecticut for instance, if a husband beats his wife it is categorized under the “Family Violence” section of their state UCR. This information is not put in the overall AA numbers forwarded to the FBI for inclusion in the national report. Michigan, on the other extreme, reports prisoner-on-prisoner violence in their statistics just as if the crime had occurred on the street.
I funded a study on this subject back in 1993, when two cities I knew well were reported as being far different in violent crime. Once the results were established and the glaring error in reporting was obvious, I contacted the Assistant Director of the FBI and the chairman of the UCR committee (who, at that time was the chief of the Seattle police department) to point out the disparity. They were both upset someone was looking at this and didn’t want to rock the boat. UCR reporting is voluntary, so no one wanted to change the way reporting was being done.
That’s how our government works.
"They were both upset someone was looking at this and didn’t want to rock the boat. UCR reporting is voluntary, so no one wanted to change the way reporting was being done."
-- Publish the study independently, prove it. Blow a whistle. Take it to CNN or Breitbart or Huffington Post. Any one of them will run it. Rock the boat.
That study is lost in the dustbin of history, sitting on a long forgotten floppy disc in what now would be an unreadable VisiCalc program.
The bulk of the work back then was writing each individual state and requesting the information (about 38 states complied), then taking the information from the booklets and transferring it into the ancient spreadsheet for analysis. Today, most everything is online. A new study would be relatively easy.
I’ll see if time permits and, if so, take another run at it.
Just for clarification, the disparities between how individual states report their crime statistics are more politics and economics than anything else.
Some states want low crime figures for prestige, higher property values, tourist attraction and the like. Others want inflated numbers for better access to federal funds that pays for overtime and equipment, along with social program money like midnight basketball.
Ideally, states would report more on the Connecticut model, separating aggravated assaults from domestic violence. In assessing a city or community for violent crime, there is a difference in how safe you are walking down the street as opposed to what is happening in family violence. Although both sets of statistics are needed, there should be a distinction between the two. Naturally, crime within prisons shouldn’t be included in reports as if it was occurring on the streets.
The trouble is, people in government don’t give a shit. They have a box and if they can check the box, everything is good – even if it is all a waste of time.
Gee, I wonder if Barrett is regretting running for Gov in the recall. Would this have gotten as much play if he hadn't been running a campaign on "cutting crime" in Milwaukee?
jwest,
"Digging further, the bulk of AA is domestic violence."
Seriously? That's amazing.
Oh, wait, you separated out robbery, so maybe not so surprising.
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