Reporting of Crime Stats Not As Accurate As We Hoped

When the police make a report about a crime, the report is usually made out on some sort of Record Management System (RMS). Currently these RMS programs are installed on computers in many police cars.

The RMS software can be programed on a couple of different levels. It is programed when it is built of course, and the individual police departments can make further changes and set the RMS to report in a given way. Such as, if the police department for some reason wanted to make it look like all crimes were done by women it could set the RMS to only report the perpetrators only as women.

In reality what I have found is when an incident happens to be an anti-race crime, in other words a crime of hate against of one race or gender, or sexual orientation against another, such as black harming a white person because they are white (a anti-white crime) or whatever, there is no way this hate crime can be documented or reported in the RMS systems because the software has been set to not allow the officer to report said incident as a hate crime, even if it was blatantly obvious that was the case.

This is forced and biased skewing of the numbers. More than likely done for federal funding or to make sure a chief of police somewhere looks better than they really are? One has to wonder what other crimes are indeed skewed and to what degree and for what purpose?

According to the FBI’s website, the RMS reporting systems do a far better job than the paper systems did. That may well be true if the reporting system was not leaning to overlook facts on reports. Otherwise there is no gain to any system regardless of the systems complexity. That issue edges into the unnecessary spending of the local, state and federal governments on systems by companies that sell the taxpayers a bill of goods or systems that are not used correctly by agencies.

I spoke with a person that represented one of the RMS program makers in Louisiana, and in my opinion they were indeed concerned about the accuracy and quality of their products and they were in fact genuine and sincere about accuracy and reliability. Not once did they shy away from any question I asked. No double talk and no excuses. Which is absolutely the exception rather than the rule, when dealing with anything political or anything that is contingent upon government funding.

There was a question brought up by them about the compatibility of different RMS programs, I discovered that these RMS programs are not universally compatible with one another. Many are not compatible with the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program formulated by the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) that “presents comprehensive, detailed information about crime incidents to law enforcement, researchers, governmental planners, students of crime, and the general public”. But even with all this rhetoric there is no reason at this point, to believe that any figures put out by the government regarding crimes of any kind could or should be accepted as accurate. For the simple fact there are no enforcible standards that would insure accuracy. There are guidelines and policies, but not laws and thereby can’t be enforced as laws. It is important to note that the individual states, have their own reporting system as well as the governments.

All this leads me to believe the individual policing agency decides how they want to present their data to the FBI. In the one case that brought this to my attention the parameters happen to be a majority black town, with a black police chief, and their system will not allow any racially motivated crime to be recorded as such. This is frightening. I suspect this must be the case in so many communities, simply because of the obvious lack of truthfulness in the FBI reports.

The one main question I have, is why would the DOJ mandate this kind of reporting that would make it easy to change and or skew the facts on an issue that would seem to be so very important?

When I go to read the FBI’s numbers on hate crimes I wonder to myself why they don’t add up to what I hear from the media, even main stream media reports much more heinous crimes than what I saw outlined in the reports.

I will bring you up to date on this as I get more information.

June 27, 2008 · Filed Under Politics

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