29 May 2013
Whether or not our lives are intertwined, through our jobs, family relationships, etc., with law enforcement, most of us are concerned about the crime rate. It can affect our feeling of well-being and safety, and that of our children. So when a report comes along that provides an opinion on the apparent direction that crime is heading in our city, we take notice – but we don’t accept the figures or the conclusions blindly.
A case in point occurred last Thursday, with an article indicating that both crime and homelessness are down in Austin. We’re not sure if the authors intended that we assume there is a connection between the two (i.e., homeless people commit crimes, so a drop in the homeless population leads to a reduction in crime), but we’re not at all convinced that the conclusions, or even the statistics, are very valuable.
If we want to look at crime statistics for the city, we’ve found that the best place to view them is in the Uniform Crime Reports issued by the FBI. And if you want to compare, say, 2011 and 2012, you can easily do so. What the numbers indicate are this:
- Violent crime in Austin dropped by just over 5% between 2011 and 2012.
- Of the offenses in the violent crime category, rape, robbery and aggravated assault were down. Murder, on the other hand was up, from 12 in 2011 to 16 in 2012.
- Property crime was up by almost 3% during the same period, and this included increases in all three crimes (burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft) in that category.
These figures, of course, even though they appear reliable, may or may not be useful in understanding what conditions tend to increase or decrease the crime rate. But we do believe that any analysis of the causes of criminal behavior requires more information than a comparison of a couple of years of figures. Indeed, when we reported on the Austin crime rate about a year ago (see our blog of May 3, 2012 entitled Austin Crime Down) we noted that, consistent with the drop in violent crime between 2011 and 2012, violent crime was down by 9% from 2010 and 2011. On the other hand, property crime, which was up last year by 3%, fell between 2010 and 2011 by 8%.
The point here is that changes on a one or two year basis in the number of crimes in any given category is simply insufficient to identify causes, or to identify trends. Such an analysis requires more information than the statistics themselves, and certainly more than numbers from just a couple of years.
Law Office of David D. White, PLLC
1205 Rio Grande Street
Austin, TX 78701
(512) 369-3737