Thursday, January 22, 2009

Loss from crime

Friday, the Mayor will be releasing the 2008 crime statistics for Lincoln. I've been devoting time recently to analysis, some of which has been posted here on the Chief's Corner, with a little more to come in the next few days.

This one is the result of just summing the "loss" field in our Incident Reports. It may be a bit surprising to some people.

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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2009 at 6:42 AM

    Probably helps that Derek and Jason are in Prison :)

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2009 at 10:58 AM

    How much of that total is larceny from auto vs larceny from building? Does the total include collateral property damage (broken windows, damaged locker doors, etc)?

    I'll tell you this, I'd like to see larceny from auto become "auto burglary" (and a felony in all cases, regardless of the value of property stolen). If the total of property damage and swag lost exceeded $500, it would then become "aggravated auto burglary", with double the sentence. That's just a little idea of mine.

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  3. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2009 at 11:08 AM

    Does this discount property that was recovered or is this the total of property stolen. Not that I think one way is better then the other, just wondering. It would be hard to subtract the value of recovered property if you had property recovered from previous years or agencies...

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  4. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2009 at 12:12 PM

    Isn't loss/damage value on an incident report more of an estimate than a true known value at the time of report?

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  5. Tom CasadyJanuary 22, 2009 at 3:27 PM

    6:42-

    Almost certainly.

    10:58-

    The theft loss from larceny/auto in 2008 was $959,037. No, the theft loss is just that--property damage is another field in the database. For 2008, the total damage was $2,853,513. Larceny from auto accounted for $188,646 of that damage. Someday I'll get around to updating this graph.

    11:08-

    No, that's the theft loss--regardless of whether any of the goods were recovered.

    12:12-

    Unless it's something with a fixed and defined value (like cash from the register, or a shoplifted ham), the loss is an estimate--normally the victim's best estimate.

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  6. AnonymousJanuary 25, 2009 at 10:05 PM

    Chief,

    In this story, our great local paper seems unwilling to give a location for the incident, and they're keeping any detailed physical description of the suspect under wraps too. Can you clue us in on either?

    Also, if you did release a suspect description to the paper, could you take a guess as to why they decided not to include that in their story?

    ReplyDelete