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Understanding crime statistics, comparisons

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LAKE COUNTY — Two of the most dangerous places in Montana are reported to be right here in Lake County. On Nov. 22, RoadSnacks released their list of “The Ten Most Dangerous Cities in Montana.” Polson was number two on the list, and Ronan was number five. 

RoadSnacks’ report is meant more for entertainment than anything else, although the website gives their list a bit of authority by saying they use actual statistics. And to get a clear picture of what they do, it’s worth noting that they also rank towns on a “redneck” scale using scientific data — none of the towns in Lake County made that list. Let’s pull back the layers and look into those statistics to see why using the crime data to compare towns doesn’t really work.

RoadSnacks used data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports with data compiled from towns across Montana. That’s right, the information was from the FBI, and it checks out as accurate, but should be put into the right context.

The FBI’s collected crime statistics are a measure of crime from law enforcement perspectives. The data is taken from reports written by police officers and doesn’t reflect the number of actual convictions. 

As far as being called a city, the FBI’s database doesn’t distinguish between cities and towns, so Ronan and Polson were labeled as cities. RoadSnacks picked out the “cities” with populations over 1,000, which left them with 38 places to compare, and they used data from the past three years. 

RoadSnacks reported that Ronan was the smallest city to make the list and the most violent. They assessed each town by dividing its population by the number of reported crimes from the FBI’s data. In 2013, Ronan had a reported population of 1,923 and 15 violent crimes, which creates the probability that a person had a 1 in 128 chance of being the victim of a violent crime. That statistic put the town within the top five “most dangerous cities” on the list. 

The statistics collected by the FBI for Ronan in 2013 included zero murders, two rapes, zero robberies, 13 aggravated assaults, 52 property crimes, five burglaries, 47 larceny-thefts, zero motor vehicle thefts and zero arsons, and those numbers didn’t drastically change in 2014.

Polson ranked number two on the most dangerous of cities list. The town ranked number one for property crime and number five for violent crime. In 2013, Polson residents were reported by RoadSnacks as having a 1 in 15 chance of being the victim of theft or arson. Violent crime “bumped up” 50 percent between 2011 and 2013.

According to the FBI, in 2013, Polson had 24 violent crimes, zero murders, three rapes, one robbery, 20 aggravated assaults, 309 property crimes, 25 burglaries, 260 larceny-thefts, 24 motor vehicle thefts and one reported incident of arson. In 2014, property crimes and larceny-thefts increased by about 50 crimes.

And as a side note, Charlo, Arlee and Pablo didn’t make it onto the FBI’s data sheet. St. Ignatius was included with a population of 853. And in St. Ignatius, zero violent crimes were reported, zero murders, zero rapes, zero robberies, zero aggravated assaults, 10 property crimes, zero burglaries, nine larceny-thefts, one motor vehicle theft and zero arsons. 

Crime statistics are often released to the public. The Montana Board of Crime Control recently released their crime report for the state. The Polson Police Department also compiles statistics on their website. But, the numbers are not as simple as they look. Many varying factors need to be considered when analyzing the numbers. 

The FBI notes that making any kind of list out of the data is a bad idea. They created the list to provide law enforcement with data for budgeting, resource allocation, and for other assessments. Criminal justice researchers use the data to study the nature and movement of crime over time, and news media use the information to inform the public, but the data is incomplete. The factors that vary in different towns include population density, composition of the populations, youth concentration, economic conditions, recreation, climate, crime reporting practices and many other factors. 

“These incomplete analyses have often created misleading perceptions which adversely affect geographic entities and their residents,” the FBI noted in a warning document with the reported crime data. “For this reason, the FBI has a long-standing policy against ranking participating law enforcement agencies on the basis of crime data alone. Despite repeated warnings against these practices, some data users continue to challenge and misunderstand this position,” 

Lake County Sheriff Don Bell said that one of the biggest flaws with the list compiled by RoadSnacks is that it attempts to compare towns with different population sizes. 

“It’s like comparing apples to oranges,” he said, adding that the towns have similarities but putting them together for comparison doesn’t give a true representation. He said a comparison of towns with the same population numbers would be more accurate.

“Obviously, we have violent crime,” Bell said. “But it could also be that we are making more arrests.”

Another problem with the list is that not every law enforcement division is required to report crimes to the FBI, which can skew the results. Sheriff Bell said that his department automatically reports to the national database when an officer writes a report.

James Lapotka, chief criminal deputy attorney for Lake County, said that it’s possible to take those numbers from the FBI and fit them into any agenda. He said the list could also be called the top ten towns making the most arrests. He doesn’t think that calling a town the most dangerous is a fair assessment to Polson or any other town on the list, even if it is for entertainment. 

“We could look at the wonderful job that our law enforcement is doing,” he said. 

Lapotka said that a better measure would be to look at the actual convictions and not just arrest statistics, but that also poses a problem. He said that lists take the human element out of a town.

“Each criminal case is individual,” he said. “Each person is a human being and we should consider that and not just numbers.”

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