“[W]e’re very concerned with the direction that crime is going,” LBPD Chief Jim McDonnell said in an October interview. “[…] I know that if we were able to go back to the number [of officers] that we had three years ago, we could turn that [current crime] trend around again.”
McDonnell’s sentiments made sense to most Long Beachers. Budget cuts had left the department with 20 percent fewer officers than it had three years earlier, and in 2012 shootings seemed almost a daily occurrence, with residents of several neighborhoods feeling under siege. An October LBPD memo noted a 77.8 percent increase in murder from the year prior, along with a 19.5 percent jump in rape.
But according to the LBPD’s recent press release on year-end crime statistics, “[In 2012] Long Beach achieved a 40-year low for violent crime,” noting that murder, up either 16 percent or 20 percent over 2011’s record low, “was the only violent crime category to increase.”
That’s not quite true, though. While the LBPD numbers register a 6 percent drop in robberies and a 5.5 percent drop in aggravated assaults, in actuality there were three more rapes in 2012 than in 2011.
Sgt. Aaron Eaton, a LBPD spokesperson, explains that part of the reason for the divergence between the LBPD’s October recording of a 77.8 percent annual increase in murders and the 16–20 percent increase recorded at year’s end is that during the last quarter of the 2012 three deaths originally classified as murders were reclassified, along with one 2011 death being newly classified as a murder.
“These reclassifications happen throughout the year depending on multiple factors,” Eaton says. “For instance, the murder from 2011 didn’t get reclassified until 2012, when it was reclassified by the Coroner’s Office.”
It’s that 2011 reclassification injects some ambiguity—at least for anyone looking at it from the outside—as to whether the 2012 increase is 16 percent or 20 percent. Contrary to Eaton’s statement that the Coroner’s Office reclassified the death as murder—a statement that also appears in the LBPD press release—as Lt. Fred Corral of the Los Angeles Department of Coroner confirmed for the Long Beach Post (for an unrelated story in early 2012), coroners do not make murder classifications.
Whatever the case, even if the two violent-crime categories that were up in 2012 (i.e., murder and rape) were statistically offset enough by the two that were down (robbery and aggravated assault) enough to justify the claim that Long Beach experienced a four-decade low in violent crime, in October Chief McDonnell was voicing concerns over crime trends. When asked about McDonnell’s statements, Eaton stated the importance of putting them in the proper context.
“In 2010, we had lowest crime in 40 years,” Eaton says. “Then 2011, we had a little uptick with crime. In 2012, the earlier part of the year, the crime was kind of trending up, and that was about the time [McDonnell] made that comment. Are we concerned about property crime going up [9 percent over 2011]? Certainly. Are we concerned about violent crime? Absolutely.”
Eaton says crime statistics “are really just a gauge, that ability for us to look at what’s happening and then how to direct the limited resources we have today [… I]t just gives us a better idea of where we need to put our resources that we do have.”
But as anyone familiar with the general topic of police crime statistics across the country (along with anyone who’s a fan of The Wire) can tell you, this is not the only thing police have ever done with them. In 2010, for example, more than half of the 309 retired New York Police Department officers surveyed admitted to “fudging” crime statistics to make NYC appear safer than it actually was. In 2012 the Milwaukee Police Department was found to have engaged in similar behavior, with hundreds of crimes misreported as minor assaults so as not to be included in the city’s violent-crime rate.
No such accusations have been formally leveled against the LBPD (although a former Citizens Police Complaint Commission investigator alleged a culture of LBPD underreporting when he discussed his wrongful-termination lawsuit against the City of Long Beach with the Post in late 2012). Nonetheless, it’s always worth holding our public servants to account for their statements. Contrary to what the LBPD stated recently, murder was not the only violent-crime category that was up in 2012, and the Coroner’s Office did not reclassify a 2011 death as a murder. These may both be innocent mistakes, and they may be the only inaccuracies in the LBPD’s account of 2012. But they highlight what shouldn’t be news to anyone: government pronouncements—be they at the city, state, or federal level—should never be taken for gospel.
What is certain is that during a three-year period in which budget cuts depleted its force by 20 percent, the LBPD has announced that the city experienced its lowest crime rate in 40 years (2010), its lowest murder rate ever (2011), and its lowest violent-crime rate in 40 years (2012). All of these pronouncements may be true, the results of dumb luck, good community policing, an increasingly peaceful society, or who knows what (although it presents us with the curious question of why the crime rate was generally higher when the LBPD had more officers on the street). But experiencing record lows in crime while a police force is being cut “to the bone,” as Chief McDonnell stated on numerous occasions in 2012, seems counterintuitive. As such, it’s a trend that may be particularly deserving of close public scrutiny.
The LBPD published its year-end crime-stats press release (without the statistics themselves) on its Facebook page. “Wow,” posted one resident in reply, “now i feel safer (kinda).” It’s a statement, with its parenthetical, that touches upon the feelings of many Long Beachers: The numbers may say that 2012 was a 40-year low for violent crime, but it sure doesn’t feel that way.
Read more:
- A Closer Look At LBPD Crime Stats
- 2012 Crime Statistics: Property Crimes Up, Overall Violent Crime Down
- LBPD Says Murder Up 78% Along With Spikes In Most Other Crime