Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Statewide crime prediction

Friday's release of Lincoln's 2009 crime stats took place earlier in the year than in most other cities. We normally have our UCR crime reports wrapped up by the middle of the month, so we are ready pretty early. The national data all has to be compiled. The FBI's annual compendium of Uniform Crime Report data, Crime in the United States, generally isn't published until the fall.

In Nebraska, the Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice sends the local UCR data on to the FBI, and also publishes its own statewide report, cleverly titled Crime in Nebraska. Like the FBI, the Nebraska Commission of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice publishes the report online. It also has a very slick application which allows you to plug in various parameters and create your own statistical reports. The Nebraska report will be out this spring or summer.

In the meantime, I am predicting that statewide crime in Nebraska will fall in 2009. My prognostication is that the decline will be slightly more than 3% overall. Auto theft and aggravated assaults will fall significantly, while there will be a slight uptick in burglary, and reported rapes will increase by around 10%. This prediction sounds pretty similar to what we already know from Lincoln's data.

Omaha hasn't released its end-of-year crime data for 2009 yet, but the data for the first 11 months are published on their public web site. The pattern looks very similar to Lincoln. December's rotten weather would almost guarantee low crime during the 12th month, so I doubt the year end percentages in Omaha will change much in any of the crime categories.

If the crime data for Lincoln and Omaha are similar, it's a pretty good bet that the Statewide data will reflect the same trend, since these two cities together comprise about 39% of the State's population. Lincoln is 14%, Omaha 25%. Later this year, we can see if my projection proves accurate.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

The graffiti has taken off again. I spoke with Rev Don Coleman and he said we no longer have a volunteer group to battle this. Seems the city did not want to fund the project of removing this garbage. The city, in all their wisdom, now spends money issuing notifications to owners of vandalized property to have the paint removed. This is about the same logic as we have had for a long time from elected people. Another reason to not vote. I, for one, will not be part of the brainless majority.

Anonymous said...

Shouldn't it be the business owner's responsibility to clean up their property anyway. If someone spray painted my car or house the city sure wouldn't come out and clean it up for me.

Anonymous said...

11:14
It must be nice to live on a deserted island.

Anonymous said...

Cleaning up graffiti should be part of the sentencing by the judge in my opinion. If these tag artists knew they were going to have to clean it up IF/WHEN they get caught they might at least go with a spray paint that cleaned up easier LOL.

Gun Nut

Anonymous said...

Part of a graffiti vandal's sentence should be having their hands used for K-9 bite training/practice, though that would probably be classified as "cruel and unusual".

Anonymous said...

Here is another stupid idea. The city pays for materials and the jail provides the workers to clean up the mess.