Though reports throughout the year indicated that crime of all types was on the rise, Long Beach Police Department’s end-of-year statistics for 2012 expressed numbers far more tame. Despite reporting a 78 percent increase in murders and a 19.5 percent increase in rape last October, for example, 2012 ended up being a 40 year low for overall violent crime.
We reported on the LBPD’s final 2012 crime stats when the end-of-the-year numbers were released in January, but wanted to get a better understanding of how these statistics work, specifically why some of the more frightening spikes from earlier in the year ended up far more tame in the end.
We had a chance to talk with Sgt. Aaron Eaton of the LBPD about how violent crime stats are derived, what factors can affect them and some of the ways that the Department worked to combat crime in the last year:
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and explain a little better where these numbers come from. Back in October, murders were up 78 percent, but at the end of the year, murders were only up 14 percent. Did reclassifications of some deaths out of the murder category contribute to the lesser increase for final stats in 2012?
The way that that works is that throughout the year in that murder category, there are always changes and reclassifications. We reclassified one from 2011 into 2012 that’s why the number [of murders in 2011] increased from 25 to 26. There is a constant evaluation of those deaths so that some of those get reclassified.
In September, YTD, the murder number was 32. So to answer your question if whether or not reclassifications at the end of the year made that number all of a sudden lower, the answer is no because throughout the year, those cases get reclassified, it’s not just at the end of the year. Even if it were the case where at the end of the year in December, there were reclassifications, that doesn’t mean that’s going to happen next year.
These reclassifications happen throughout the year depending on multiple factors. For instance, the murder from 2011 didn’t get reclassified to a murder until next year when it was reclassified by the coroner’s office. Sometimes there are examples where someone was injured in Long Beach one year, but dies somewhere else the next year. We calculate the death in that year, but the incident happened the year before.
So if there were 32 deaths by October and only one more that occurred before the end of the year, but 30 is listed as a final number on the 2012 end-of-year statistics, does that mean there were three that got reclassified?
Yes, that’s right. At the end of the year, we have to cut off the numbers at some point and we obviously do it at end of December. And so although that’s ongoing work for us because even in 2013, we’re still going to be investigating murders that were unsolved from 2012 and there may be chance that one of those, because it’s still being investigated, is reclassified.
Aside from reclassifications, what else could contribute to statistics that report big spikes throughout the year becoming far more moderate by the end of the year?
Let’s use that rise in September as an example. By the end of September 2012, we had 32 murders. At that same time in 2011 at that point, year-to-date was 18, so there’s the 77.8 percent. But then the next two months, we only had one murder and there were six during that same time period in 2011. It’s very difficult to talk about increases during the year because that’s not what the numbers are going to be like at the end of the year when we cut them off.
2011 was also a record-low year for murders, so anything above those lows could be considered a “spike,” right?
Exactly. Because it was such a low year, anything that goes up is an increase. If we have one murder, that changes it drastically and if we have two, then it changes it exponentially.
The increase in rapes also was not as drastic at the end of the year as it had been in the quarterly reports. How are rape statistics affected differently than murder statistics?
Rapes are unique because we encourage people to report rapes—it’s a heavily underreported crime. And so in rapes, an increase may be that officers are doing a good job at encouraging victims to cooperate in reporting these types of crimes. We know about a murder because someone has lost their life, but there may have been a rape that happened that we don’t capture because it wasn’t reported.
There are a multitude of reasons why a sexual assault goes un-reported, so although numbers goes up, it’s hard to quantify rapes because we want victims to report them but we also want to try to lessen them occurring. Without every single sexual assault being reported, it’s hard to tell confidently what the true numbers are.
So there are a lot of factors that go into these statistics beyond just whether or not a crime occurred?
Definitely. But the reason we do statistics and put out these numbers is to give us at least a gauge of what we’re doing successfully and what we need to work more aggressively on. They are ever-changing in a lot of ways. There are so many dynamics that happen that can affect them, as we’ve talked about.
A quote from Chief McDonnell regarding the end-of-the-year statistics said that the Department focused on violent crime in 2012. What kinds of things did the Department do?
Operation Summer Heat is one example of how we collaborated with state and national partners to attack violent crime in 2012. We also have a partnership with the city prosecutors office; they work alongside us with gang injunctions. It just becomes another tool and a resource to us to combat violent crime and take gang members off of the streets.
Another way in which we have been combatting violent crime and one which we will continue to do is through use of our techonolgy. We’re trying to use technology to benefit us and so we often post videos of crimes on our social media websites so we can partner with the public to help solve crime.
Chief McDonnell said earlier in 2012 that he was “very concerned with the direction crime is going.” Was he referring mostly to property crimes? Since violent crime was reduced again in 2011, will property crimes that be a focus of the department this year?
For your question, I want to make sure we have the right context for it. In 2010, we had lowest crime in 40 years. 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 he made that comment.
Are we concerned about property crime going up? Certainly. Are we concerned about violent crime? Absolutely. As resources start to lessen within the department, it becomes very important to make sure that the resources we have are used appropriately. We also use the looking at trends and spikes and patterns, when we can see them, to direct us in our deployment of resources. Again, these statistics are really just a gauge. It gives us that ability for us to look at what’s happening and how to direct the limited resources we have.