Is Team Obama Misrepresenting the Violent Crime Stats?

a reply to: cronemel

Excellent post! Thank you for sharing the intricacies of local PDs having to "adjust" their crime categories into the FBI's framework for their statistics.

But what is inexcusable, are PDs downgrading felony charges to misdemeanors, and/or classifying a dangerous weapon used in an attack as "Other." This skews the Violent Crime stats, and makes the public even more distrustful of police.

I know communities trying to grow or attract Big Business for jobs, rely a lot on low Violent Crime stats to attract new residents. So this is a thorny issue, and I appreciated reading your "insider input."

a reply to: xuenchen

Thanks for your post.

As several of the linked articles said, inner-city, urban Violent Crime never really goes down, due to drugs and gangs. The main difference is that when cities' passed "Concealed Handgun" laws, people on the outskirts of those areas felt safer - and had firepower if attacked or car-jacked.

This made mush of all the liberal's prospective anti-gun laws - and the whole subject has dropped out of sight.

I don't want to give the impression that I am anti-police - quite the opposite.

And in order to highlight some of the time-consuming but positive aspects of police departments, here's an LAPD branch working with at-risk kids to help keep them out of gangs - clearly one of the most important urban concerns today:

devonshire-pals.org...
LAPD: DEVONSHIRE PALS