Chief DeMoura's Scary Mixed-up Math

There's a particularly badly-written article in today's S&E about Gov. Patrick's visit to Fitchburg and the coming budget cuts.

I'll leave analysis of budget stuff to Jason though. It puts me to sleep.

What I'm interested in is this:

Police Chief Robert DeMoura said the city doesn't receive enough money to begin with for Community Policing. He said the state [sic] last year had the third highest violent crime rate for cities of comparable size, but it didn't receive proportional funding.

Yeah, horrible writing. I assume that should have said "the city last year...", not "the state last year..." That's the assumption I'm going to work under, anyway.

It's an odd statement anyway. Third highest sounds bad, right? But third out of how many? What's a "comparable size," anyway?

Fitchburg's population in 2007 was 40,180, so are we looking at 39,000-41,000 maybe?
Oh, there are only five cities in that range (Beverly, Holyoke, Fitchburg, Westfield, Arlington). Third out of five doesn't sound all that bad, actually.

We could add in Salem, Leominster, and Billerica if we go up to 42,000. So third out of eight? That doesn't sound too terrible either.

Let's be extra generous and give a range of 35,000-45,000. Then we have 14 whole cities to choose from! In addition to the previously-mentioned cities we also get Everett, Woburn, Marlborough, Pittsfield, Attleboro, and Methuen (from smallest to biggest). What a happy bunch of towns!

Now we encounter another problem. DeMoura was talking about the violent crime rate for last year. The 2007 figures aren't available on the FPD website, though I don't doubt they exist (the FPD can be a bit slow about updating their site). No matter, that wouldn't help us with the thirteen other towns anyway!

Instead, we'll go to the FBI, and specifically this report.

Notably, the FBI has a huge caution against ranking on its site. Among other things, it says:

These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.

Hear that, Chief? Don't rank things! It's a dumb idea!

But since he already did it, I suppose I might as well check his figures.

Except that I can't! When I try to get the violent crime number for Fitchburg, I'm instead directed to this footnote:

The data collection methodology for the offense of aggravated assault used by this agency does not comply with national UCR Program guidelines. Consequently, the figures for aggravated assault and violent crime (of which aggravated assault is a part) are not included in this table.

So I can't even really compare! Leominster and Westfield have the same problem, so that's 3 out of our 14 cities that are now junk.

To make matters worse, aggravated assault is the biggest of the four subcategories that go into the "violent crime" category. What the hell sort of data is DeMoura even using to make his claim that Fitchburg is the third worst? This seems increasingly like a made-up claim.

Well, I could compute a new number of violent crimes without aggravated assault, figure out the crime rate (which is number of crimes per 100,000 people), and compare that!

So I did. Here were the top 5:

1. Holyoke: 254
2. Everett: 187
3. Pittsfield: 185
4. Fitchburg: 149
5. Leominster: 94

Damn, so close!

This isn't a really valid way to do things though, because those aggravated assault figures make a big difference. (Perhaps this is why they warn against rankings!) With the aggravated assault figures back in (and Fitchburg, Leominster, and Westfield automatically excluded) we get:

1. Holyoke: 1,250
2. Pittsfield: 683
3. Everett: 511
4. Salem: 323
5. Attleboro: 320

The order on the lower end of the list is all screwed up too, so aside from Holyoke being the worst in both cases, the first list is useless for ranking.

Perhaps you're thinking that Chief DeMoura has access to Fitchburg's aggravated assault figures and could therefore have calculated stuff out to get our mysterious third place ranking? Maybe so, but Fitchburg's figures are calculated differently than all the other ones here, so they're not usable for that purpose.

I'm also betting he doesn't have Leominster or Westfield's figures. It wouldn't matter if he did, though, because they're unusable for the same reason Fitchburg's numbers are unusable.

What's the point of all this?

Simple, the claim that Fitchburg has the third worst violent crime rate among towns our size in Massachusetts is meaningless scaremongering. It's not supported by the facts, and even if he had some sort of calculation that he could make come out that way, it wouldn't mean anything.

I know DeMoura is pushing for more pay for his officers, but doing it through fear is just plain wrong.

By the way, when it comes to property crime, Fitchburg ranks 6th out of these 14. Leominster is fourth. Chief DeMoura didn't choose to highlight this number though. After all, it's not scary.

If Jesus Ran for President

Shocking news! Ted's not big on tolerance!

Oh boy, Ted's back in the news. Thankfully, this time it's just for having dumb ideas and not for bullying veterans or mistreating the hungry.

And in what will come as a surprise to no one, the homophobic guy who's led racially-charged marches through minority sections of town is advocating "Zero Tolerance".

Per yesterday's Sentinel Article:

Zero tolerance, from the city's police department to its code enforcement officers, is needed to revive the blighted neighborhoods here, according to mayoral candidate Ted E. DeSalvatore.

"I'm not looking for discretion, I'm not looking for diplomacy," he said in an interview this week with the Sentinel & Enterprise's editorial board. "I want to identify the hot spots, our blighted areas -- the worst ones -- and within them, which are the worst dwellings. Going in with the intention to make sure they stop doing business the way they're doing it no matter what."

Yeah, discretion and diplomacy are terrible traits in a leader! Heaven forbid we elect a mayor who understands that not everything is black and white!

Wait a second, dwellings do business? Huh?

Of course, it's not really fair to make fun of the guy's inability to form a coherent sentence. If it were, I'd have to make fun of this terribly poor choice of words (my emphasis):

"After dealing with drug dealers on the corner, my inspiration was to continue on," he said.

... and making fun of that is just too easy.

Then there's this one:

"I don't live far away from 'hell zone.' I'm on the edge of it," he said. "I walked it, I drive it. I'm pretty much like the thermometer, I've had a good grip on the pulse of the community."

It gives me an idea for a new campaign slogan for him, though. "Vote Ted, he's the thermometer of Hell zone!" If you're reading, Ted, you can use that one free of charge!

Also, way to badmouth Fitchburg some more! Nobody's at all tired of that. On the other hand, I have no difficulty believing that Ted's neighbors would view their neighborhood as "Hell Zone", I just suspect it's for different reasons than he does.

On to the zero tolerance bit though:

"I want a guy [for the new police chief] that's going to be a top cop. I want him to keep his nose out of the politics and I want to leave the social-service work to social-service workers," he said, offering praise for Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York and current Republican presidential candidate's approach to combating crime in New York. "I believe we need to have pretty much a zero tolerance."

Oh man, do you really want to hitch your wagon to Rudy "my only accomplishment as mayor was my city got struck by a terrorist attack" Giuliani?

Okay, that's not entirely fair either. Prior to 9/11 Giuliani was better known for police brutality, increasing racial tensions, harassing a lot of innocent people for no reason, racial profiling, and of course cheating on his wife and generally treating his family members like shit. Why do you think his daughter supports Obama for president?

To continue:

DeSalvatore later said, "There have been a lot of restrictions on our local guys and girls," partly because of "a touchy-feely thing that was brought in by the previous chief. Nice guy, but I think he was much too soft for the environment that we're in."

I believe "guys and girls" here refers to police officers (and I'm sure the female officers love to be called "girls").

Of course, here's the big problem. Shockingly, the Sentinel neglected to put this statement in context, but I'll fill in the blank. Chief Cronin's approach was actually working quite well. I've written about it before here. In a nutshell, crime has been decreasing. Want to see for yourself? Go get the 2006 Fitchburg Police Department annual report here (it's a .pdf).

I'm not going to go into a whole analysis of the thing, but the "Crime Index" on page 10 (page 12 of the pdf) gives the basic story. Lower is better.

• 2002: 2,302
• 2003: 2,526
• 2004: 2,546
• 2005: 2,286
• 2006: 1,927

Hmm, the facts seem to indicate that the crime rate has been improving! Seems like Cronin was on to something. What could it have been?

Here's an old quote from Cronin:

Cronin said the department has been focusing on more than just suppression, acknowledging through programs, reinforcement and advocacy that crime is a much larger issue affected by outside factors such as economics and race.

"We've generated a big picture way of looking at the problems," Cronin said. "You can't keep hitting things in one way, you can't keep arresting people and ignore the outside factors that have contributed to the crime, and minority status and poverty are right on top."

Yeah, that's a very sensible approach. One that actually addresses the source of the problems rather than just punishing people after the crime is committed. If you stop it at its roots you don't have to worry about that.

Of course, Ted would presumably call that "social service work", which as we know he doesn't care for. More sensible people would call it addressing the roots of the problem. If you want to keep crime down it makes a lot more sense to keep it from occurring in the first place. If you want to live in a police state though, Ted's your man!

Why does DeSalvatore keep harping on crime so much? Well, it's all he's got. As far as concrete plans for improving the city go, he's way behind Donnelly and Wong. Anyone who votes for him is going to do it because Ted's convinced them that they're in some sort of imminent danger and only he can protect them.

Unfortunately for his campaign (but fortunately for the people of Fitchburg) that's simply not true. Come the primary, Ted will hopefully realize what Republicans the country over have been finding out: you can only scare people into voting for you for a limited time. Once the truth becomes known and the boogeymen of your own creation dissipate, so does your political career.

Let's hope people realize that truth sooner rather than later.