raimundo wrote:the fbi makes up and publishes some stats. about once a year
the only real information that you might find would be anecdotal such as the cases that involve capture with tools and stolen goods. remember that just having tools is not burglary.
The Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) are compiled by the FBI every year based on voluntarily provided data by Law Enforcement Agencies participating in the collection of data by either providing UCR tally counts of crimes that both occurred and were reported to the police... The UCR has been criticized because it is only a listing of the most serious offense in each incident, reflecting the top count only, neglecting to include any lesser included offenses... Also it is in the art of interpretation where the reporting officer and/or the data collector within each contributing agency can "downgrade" crimes which were clearly attempted but not completed...
Examples:
-- A bank robber kills a guard during the course of the robbery
That offense would be reported as a murder only under UCR...
-- A would be burglar does damage to a door clearly indicating a desire and intent to gain entry
That offense could be reported as vandalism or property damage rather than what it really was...
To resolve this issue, a new system called National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) which reports all offenses that occurred during any given incident... Although the idea and framework for NIBRS has been around for 20-something years, agencies have been slow to adopt the new method and the required technologies to be able to electronically submit the information to the FBI...
There is still a major flaw in the system in that states have a variety of different definitions for crimes (offenses committed on one side of a state line might be something entirely different those few feet away in the next state) as there are very few universally defined crimes and seeing what a category total for all homicide offenses in a given area may give a misleading impression that the area with a higher rate of occurrence for murder might be a gangland or the wild west when in fact most of the homicide offenses in that area are in reality connected with drunken driving accidents...
It would be nice to get everyone on the same type of system... This is slowly happening due in part to "Homeland Security Grants" and the Real ID program... Up until a short time ago running an inquiry on an out-of-state ID might not have been done at the time of the interaction of the person with the law enforcement officer if the link to that state's DMV system was down, so that person would be run through the NCIC active warrants database and sent on their merry way if no active warrant was listed for them -- the police being totally unaware of the validity (is it real or fake) or status (active, suspended or revoked) of the driver's license in question until after the fact...
Another scary aspect to law enforcement is in some large metropolitan areas the police field units can not even communicate between each other without having the radio dispatchers convey information over the phone to their counterpart in the neighboring departments... Given that many criminals don't respect boundary lines and neatly confine their criminal acts and escape routes entirely within one agencies' jurisdiction this is a terrible thing... Solving this problem isn't as simple as programming an additional channel into all of the radios to allow for communications with the other departments, as this can not be done if one is using a VHF system and the other a UHF system as the expense of resolving the situation is not within a budget reality of either department -- this is where a lot of grant money was going immediately after 9/11...
~~ Evan
