There was a big increase in murders in 2020, and now that the first couple of months of 2021 have been reported, the trend seems to be continuing. Plus, this year the FBI this year will begin to report crime data to the public in a different fashion than before. Newell invited former NOPD Chief and Loyola University Professor of Practice Ronal Serpas onto the show Wednesday afternoon to discuss.
“The stats are coming in and 2020 did not look good, did it?” Newell asked.
“No, and I believe there's room in the conversation to think through what effect the pandemic may have had related to crime, what the policing culture and changes and community expectations are in the post-George Floyd world,” Serpas said. “But putting that aside for a second, if you look at the way the murders are being carried out in the major cities of America, they look exactly the same... multiple shootings over indiscriminate targets at indiscriminate times of day... I'm not ready to say that there's no pandemic component, but when you look at the shooting scene in Chicago and other cities with 30, 40, 50 shell casings laying on the ground in front of funeral homes, in front of parties - what does that have to do with the pandemic? We need to face the facts that the data may not be simply explained away by that.”
“Yeah, there's obviously the retaliatory stream that runs through a lot of this,” Newell said. “Whether or not there's some kind of emotionally charged thing, or depression going on as it relates to the pandemic... I don’t know if that is as big a contributor as a lot of folks want to try and make it.”
“In New Orleans almost through the first quarter, carjackings are up 50% over last year, which was a big year, aggravated assaults are up 42% this year, as are non-fatal shootings,” Serpas said. “That's a big key issue that doesn't get a lot of attention, the non-fatal shootings. There's some evidence to suggest that for every one fatal shooting there could be as many as four non-fatal shootings, and murders are up 6%. So I think it puts aside the issue of the pandemic and the economy and all these other things, because these are very specific violent crimes. The public is sometimes surprised that a lot of violent crime is conducted between people who know one another, but this issue of carjacking is the one that used to keep me awake at night when I was chief. That is a brazen, almost always stranger-on-stranger crime which far too often results in death. That's a scary crime!”
“Those, and home invasions, those were the two scariest,” Newell agreed. “Those were the two that always drove me crazy.”
“In the blink of an eye, it can become that stranger-on-stranger crime that people are genuinely afraid of,” Serpas continued. “Where someone you've never laid eyes on in your life, like a drunk driver for example, who takes your life or takes a family member's life and destroys your life. We need to be just aware of that, and hear what these new data points that are coming out from the FBI. That's actually a good thing. The academic and the police profession have been looking for a better tool than the uniform crime reports for about 20 years now. It used to be pretty common for the media to say that the uniform crime reports were the Bible, and if you had anything that didn't agree, you must've been fudging the numbers. Well, I think they've all come to realize now that the uniform crime report was a very flawed tool. It only counted one crime. And that was the most hierarchical crime according to the FBI, not according to your state statute.”
“Let's describe that for the listening audience, how you see our work,” Newell said. “I don't think a lot of people fully grasp what’s flawed about those uniform crime reports (UCR).”
“In the 1920s, the International Association of Chiefs of Police advocated for a national standard for the measurement of crime. The FBI was given that task in 1931 and they were tracking simply this - murder, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, theft, auto theft, burglary and arson. It’s benefit was that it was 70 years in the making and that the FBI controlled the rules of how you had to report. Even if it was inconsistent with your local experience and local laws, you had to report it in those ways. And then it also had the benefit of still being voluntary - it wasn't the federal government commanding people to report this data. While about 80 to 85% of police departments report uniform crime, they were never forced to report. We needed a tool in police leadership to make better planning decisions and to make better analytic decisions about crime with a more robust data collection. That's what the National Incident-Based Reporting System does, it allows for the capture of the several different crimes… If someone broke into your home and hurt you, the FBI said the most serious crime was, let's say, assault, but your state statute might've actually made burglary a higher category, but you only counted it as an assault for UCR. So there were these differences that confused people. Now, if there was a home invasion with an associated sexual assault, with an auto theft, with a battery on the way out in the front yard, all of those crimes get counted in the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which provides for better data analytics for police and for academics.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
