Editorial: Crime numbers never ‘good’ news in any context

FBI statistics recently published by the Ledger-Enquirer indicate that you’re considerably less likely to get mugged, sexually assaulted, beaten or murdered in this city than in cities of comparable size.

The same statistics (from 2014, the latest year for which complete reports are available) indicate you’re considerably more likely to be robbed, find your home or business burglarized, or have your car stolen.

Those are good news/bad news indicators — mostly bad, because there’s no “good” category of crime — and there are asterisks, so to speak, attached to just about all of them.

Even so, they give a complex picture of a complex reality.

A few self-evident truths with regard to crime statistics come immediately to mind:

Any crime, violent or otherwise, is too much crime.

Victims of crime don’t care, nor do they have any reason to care, whether or not the overall crime statistics where they were victimized are considered “good.”

Crime is easy political, competitive and commercial fodder, regardless of whether the ways it’s portrayed for such purposes are legitimate or grossly distorted.

Even small towns are plagued by crime, and Columbus hasn’t been a small town for a long time. The FBI notes, rightly of course, that comparing crime numbers even among places with comparable populations can be misleading because of each city’s “uniqueness.” True enough … but it’s also true that one measure of a city’s uniqueness is the size and breakdown of its crime problem. It works both ways.

In terms of property crime, the Columbus Metro Statistical Area (MSA) had more auto thefts, burglaries and larcenies than Albany, Athens, Augusta, Macon or Savannah. Definitely not good. It also did not fare well regionally against Montgomery, Huntsville, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Tallahassee, Richmond and Amarillo.

Local authorities, including Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, attribute some of that property crime density to the number of youthful offenders here, and the relative inability of the law to deal with them until they are repeat offenders: “Juveniles do a lot of crimes,” said Police Chief Ricky Boren,” and there’s very little we can do with them.”

That’s not the case with violent crime, where the Columbus MSA showed itself to be statistically safer than the abovementioned regional cities. Tomlinson noted that violent crime here is, despite some horrific high-profile exceptions, “rarely random,” but more often involves perpetrators and victims who know each other.

Obviously, for reasons of infinitely greater moral and humanitarian importance than just the community’s image, we need those numbers to drop even more dramatically. As for property crime, Columbus Police Maj. Gil Slouchick said he is confident that thanks to “intelligence-based policing,” the next set of statistics will show that burglaries “came down a ton” in 2015.

Again, when the subject is crime, the idea of “good” news is relative at best. What we all want is for the rate of terrible news to plummet.

This story was originally published March 10, 2016 at 5:01 PM with the headline "Editorial: Crime numbers never ‘good’ news in any context."