For whatever reason, none of the San Antonio area websites or newspapers seem to have reported that San Antonio is now #1 in crime rate for all cities above 1 million - it used to be Dallas, but Dallas dropped to #2.
Dallas' crime rate no longer the highest among large U.S. cities
07:51 AM CDT on Wednesday, May 27, 2009
By TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News
teiserer@dallasnews.com
Dallas has shed its title as the U.S. city of more than 1 million with the highest crime rate.
The city is poised to announce that the No. 1 rank, which Dallas held for at least 10 years, now goes to San Antonio.
Based on an analysis of population growth and crime numbers released last week by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Dallas will drop to the No. 2 spot, and Houston will rank third.
"We're clearly headed in the right direction," said Mayor Tom Leppert. "I believe there is still a lot of work left to be done. We want to see it lower than it is today."
According to statistics individual cities reported to the state, Dallas now has a rate of 68 crimes per 1,000 residents; San Antonio has 79 crimes per 1,000 residents and Houston has 59 crimes per 1,000 residents. [/B]
The Dallas City Council had set a goal for the Police Department to get the city out of the top spot by 2008. The city appears to have met that goal.
"That's good news," said Police Chief David Kunkle, who took the post almost five years ago. "Our officers have worked very hard. It is a credit to a lot of different people whenever crime is going down in a community."
Last year, every category of crime – ranging from murder to theft – fell in Dallas. The city recorded more than 10,000 fewer offenses.
And crime continues to fall. It is down 17.5 percent through April.
Crime report concerns
Criminal experts have always said that using the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports to make comparisons among cities is misleading. The FBI strongly discourages the use of its national crime data for ranking purposes, in part because the way data is gathered can vary greatly from city to city, depending on the interpretation of the reporting guidelines.
"They are called uniform crime reporting, but they're not all uniform in terms of how police departments interpret the rules and record the data," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Simply crunching all the different crime categories to come up with an overall crime number isn't a good indicator of how dangerous a city is, he said. By tabulating it that way, a murder counts the same as a theft in the overall tally. It also means that a city could have a murder problem, but still look good overall if it had low recorded property crime."
Fox also said it is problematic to come up with a crime rate based on a city's resident population because some cities have large numbers of people who commute to work or visit.
"The resident population may not be a good indicator as to how many people are at risk," he said.
Dallas police readily acknowledge that changes to the department's reporting practices contributed greatly to the decrease in the city's reported crime numbers.
Changing the system
Kunkle began changing the department's offense reporting system about three years ago. He believed the system was broken, with too many incidents that were not actual crimes being recorded as such. He also found that Dallas wasn't following commonly used reporting practices, making the city look worse in comparison to its peers.
Early in 2007, the department changed how it recorded aggravated assaults after finding that officers were incorrectly recording offenses.
Later that year, the department started requiring individuals who report their vehicles stolen to sign affidavits, a change that police officials say has dramatically reduced the incidents of people falsely reporting their vehicles as stolen.
That same year, police officials found that they hadn't been following the FBI's guidelines on reporting many property crimes such as theft or car burglaries. In some cases, the rules allow multiple crimes to be reported as a single criminal act.
Without one recent procedural change, for example, Dallas' crime figures would have dropped about 7 percent last year, rather than the 10 percent that was recorded. That procedural change also continues to affect the city's crime numbers.
Downward trend
But crime is trending downward sharply, even without the reporting changes.
Last week,
The Dallas Morning News reported that a 17.5 percent drop in overall crime would have actually been about 12.5 percent without the change.
The dubious distinction of being No. 1 in crime among major cities, first reported about six years ago, played a part in the firing of Police Chief Terrell Bolton and caused consternation among city officials who feared the ranking would scare away businesses and hamper economic development. It also helped prompt the city to pour resources into the manpower-strapped department.
Leppert and other city officials believe that getting more boots on the ground has played a crucial role in helping drive down the city's crime numbers. The city now has about 3,500 police officers, about 600 more than in 2004. Dallas now has about 2.7 officers per thousand residents, placing it ever closer to reaching the longtime goal of three officers per thousand.
Even facing a tough fiscal crunch, city officials plan to add 200 more police officer positions to the force in the next budget year.
"People will come up to you and say, 'I saw a police officer patrolling my neighborhood. I never used to see that,"' Leppert said. "Clearly, we've had some terrific results in terms of the reduction in crime. But I want to make sure that we continue this."
Many criminal justice experts believe that because so many other crime categories can be subject to reporting vagaries, murder is the best indicator of a city's performance.
On that front, Dallas continues to do very well. The city ended last year with 170 murders, a 15 percent decline from the prior year's tally. The city is on track to record about 150 murders this year, which would be the lowest number in at least 40 years.
In San Antonio, a police spokesman said he could not comment on his city's rise in the rankings. But he attributed a spike in property-related crime, such as thefts, to the tremendous population growth the city continues to experience. San Antonio's overall crime jumped about 17 percent last year, fueled in large part by an increase of 10,000 theft offenses.
"We really haven't felt the crunch of the economy," Officer Joe Rios said. "We're still building homes and growing at a fast rate. We're seeing construction sites being burglarized. Metal theft also increased our numbers through the first part of the year."
The FBI is expected to release comprehensive crime statistics for American cities next week.
Prev
). We've seen an increase in crime (were #1 in something now at least). I would like SA to be the best it CAN be and he is dragging us down. Sorry, I just think we can find somebody better. Send him back to Dayton. Wait... he wasn't legally the police chief. Anyone wonder why he was only with Minneapolis for 2 years? We deserve better!
Linear Mode
