Archive for the ‘Crime Data’ Category

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Milwaukee: The Most Dangerous Size

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics issued a new report compiling nearly two decades of data on gun crime, Firearm Violence, 1993-2011.  No doubt, many readers will pore over the report’s abundant tables and graphs looking for support for their views on gun control.  However, I was most struck by a breakdown of firearm violence based on population size (table 5).  Among the six size-based categories, the most dangerous places were cities of 500,000-999,999 — the category containing Milwaukee (pop. 597,867).  These mid-large cities not only have rates of gun crime that are about four times higher than cities of less than 100,000, but they are also forty-four percent higher than cities of one million or more.

More specifically, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, there were 4.6 nonfatal firearm victimizations per 1,000 persons age twelve or older in the mid-large cities in 2010 and 2011.  (Nationally, homicides constitute only two percent of all gun-related crimes, so the NCVS numbers would not change much if fatalities were included, too.)  The second-highest rate was 3.9, for cities with 250,000-499,999.

The numbers look very different today than they did in 1996-1997, when the Milwaukee-sized cities were tied for second place with 7.3 victimizations per 1,000, and the medium-sized cities (250,000-499,999) led with 10.3.

I have two reactions to the data.  First, the relationship of community size to gun violence is in some respects predictable, and in others quite puzzling.  (more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, Milwaukee | 1 Comment »

Imprisonment Trends in the Heartland

Wednesday, January 9th, 2013

A draft of my new article, “Mass Incarceration in the Three Midwestern States: Origins and Trends,” is now available on SSRN.  Here’s the abstract:

This Article considers how the mass incarceration story has played out over the past forty years in three medium-sized Midwestern states, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The three stories are similar in many respects, but notable differences are also apparent. For instance, Minnesota’s imprisonment rate is less than half that of the other two states, while Indiana imprisons more than twice as many drug offenders as either of its peers. The Article seeks to unpack these and other imprisonment trends and to relate them to crime and arrest data over time, focusing particularly on the relative importance of violent crime and drug enforcement as drivers of imprisonment growth.

The article builds on my series of “Tale of Three States” blog posts from about a year ago.  It will appear in print later this year in a symposium issue of the Valparaiso Law Review.

 

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, State Sentencing (Not WI), Three-State Comparison, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

Nearly Two-Thirds of Sex Assaults Go Unreported, New Data Show

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released new data on unreported crime from the National Crime Victimization Survey.  Among other things, the data demonstrate the limitations of the FBI’s uniform crime reporting system, which even in theory only captures crimes that come to the attention of police.

There is a great deal from the BJS report that merits highlighting, but I’ll focus here just on the under-reporting of sexual assaults.  This was the second-least reported type of crime covered in the report.  The non-report rate for theft, the least reported crime, was only slightly higher, 67% to 65%.  By contrast, the non-report rate for car theft was only 17% and robbery 41%.

It is not surprising that theft leads the way in non-reporting, because theft is often a quite minor crime.  Indeed, 31% of the theft victims who did not report the crime to police identified as the main reason that the crime was not important enough to them.  Another 35% said that they thought the police could not or would not help; presumably, this perception, too, is largely a function of the minor nature of the crime.

What drives the non-reporting of sexual assault seems to be a quite different set of dynamics.   (more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, Sexual Offenses | No Comments »

Why Are Victims So Often Offenders, Too?

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

In Milwaukee, in 2011, more than three-quarters of homicide victims had prior arrests or citations.  This is consistent with many national studies over the years, which have demonstrated that there is a surprisingly large overlap between victim and offender populations.  In political rhetoric, there seems no end of scorn for criminals or sympathy for victims, but they are very often one and the same.  In fact, at least one study has found that the best predictor of whether an individual will commit an act of violence is whether the individual has been a victim of violence.

A fascinating new article now explores the underlying reasons why victims are so often offenders, and vice versa.  Authored by criminologist Mark Berg and colleagues, the article is “The Victim-Offender Overlap in Context: Examining the Role of Neighborhood Street Culture,” 50 Criminology 359 (2012).

One theory that has already been considered in the literature is that the propensities to offend and to suffer victimization both result from the same sorts of underlying personality traits or deficiencies.

(more…)

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Crimmigration and Discretion

Friday, May 11th, 2012

For people like me who do not regularly follow immigration law and who are only dimly aware of the recent emergence of the new field of legal practice and scholarship known as “crimmigration,” David Alan Sklansky has a terrific new article with a wealth of data demonstrating the “vanishing boundary” between criminal law and immigration law, as criminal enforcement of immigration laws has skyrocketed and as deportation has increasingly become a favored tool of law enforcement in dealing with suspected criminals.  In addition to the fascinating data, Sklansky also supplies an insightful new explanation for the rise of crimmigration — one that centers on what he sees as a growing comfort level in the United States with the idea of giving front-line actors wide discretion to select from a range of law-enforcement tools in order to address threats to public safety.  I’d like to add another layer of nuance to Sklansky’s theory of discretion, but, first, here are some of the numbers from the article that I found particularly striking:

(more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Criminal Procedure, Empirical Research, Federalism and Criminal Law, Parole, Politics of Crime and Punishment, Prosecutorial Discretion | No Comments »

A Tale of Three States, Pt. 6: Happy Days

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

In the previous post in this series, I took the imprisonment data from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin back to 1991.  I’ve been interested, though, in pinpointing when exactly the Minnesota-Wisconsin imprisonment disparity arose, which requires going back further — much further, to the 1950′s.  Here are the numbers:

WI Imprisonment Rate (per 1000,000) Percent Change MN Imprisonment Rate (per 1000,000) Percent Change IN Imprisonment Rate (per 1000,000) Percent Change
1950 58.7 n/a 63.0 n/a 120.4 n/a
1955 61.6 4.9% 61.6 -2.2% 103.1 -14.4%
1960 69.5 12.8% 60.3 -2.1% 116.4 12.9%
1965 68.3 -1.7% 49.1 -18.6% 91.1 -21.7%
1970 67.3 -1.5% 41.7 -15.1% 79.6 -12.6%
1975 65.0 -3.4% 42.0 0.7% 73.0 -8.3%
1980 85.0 30.8% 49.3 17.4% 114.0 56.2%
1985 113.6 33.6% 55.9 13.4% 182.3 60.0%
1990 152.6 34.3% 71.9 28.6% 229.7 26.0%
1995 218.6 43.3% 105.1 46.2% 277.7 20.9%
2000 386.9 77.0% 126.8 20.6% 331.0 19.2%
2005 392.9 1.6% 173.1 36.5% 399.5 (est) 20.7%
2010 387.2 -1.5% 177.8 2.7% 459.9 15.1%

The numbers tell a remarkable story.  Here are some of the parts of that story that stand out for me:

(more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, State Sentencing (Not WI), Three-State Comparison, Wisconsin Sentencing Law | 1 Comment »

A Tale of Three States, Pt. 5: The Effect of Truth in Sentencing in Wisconsin

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

Previous posts in this series have examined the latest available incarceration data from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.  This post considers historical data.  I’m particularly interested in the impact of a major change in sentencing law that was adopted in Wisconsin in 1998.  Under the “truth in sentencing” law, parole was abolished for crimes committed on or after December 31, 1999.  What impact did this have on the size of the state’s prison population?  Two hypotheses occur to me.  First, if judges continued to impose the same nominal sentences that they had been imposing, one would expect the prison population to grow because offenders would be serving longer real sentences.  Alternatively, judges might have reduced their nominal sentences to account for the loss of parole release options, attempting thereby to achieve the same real sentences as before TIS; such discounting would presumably lead to stability in the imprisonment rate.

The data, set forth in the table below, seem to support the latter hypothesis, with the current rate of imprisonment almost exactly matching that of 2000, the first full year after TIS took effect.  Indeed, since 1999, the state’s imprisonment rate has been remarkably stable.  The single largest annual change since 1999 was a 5.8% drop in 2005.  This makes for quite a contrast with the volatile 1992-1999 time period, when annual increases averaged 12%.

The picture becomes even more interesting if we focus on Wisconsin’s imprisonment rate relative to that of peer states Indiana and Minnesota.

(more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, State Sentencing (Not WI), Wisconsin Sentencing Law | 2 Comments »

A Tale of Three States, Pt. 3: Harsh Hoosiers

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

In the first post in this series, I explored the large gap between the incarceration rates of Minnesota and Wisconsin.  In the second, I discussed racial disparities in the incarcerated populations of the two states.  The disparities in both states are wide, although Wisconsin’s are somewhat larger.  In this entry, I add a third state, Indiana, to the statistical comparisons.  As another medium-sized midwestern state, one might expect that Indiana would have criminal-justice numbers that are similar to Minnesota’s and Wisconsin’s.  Indiana’s numbers, however, point to a criminal-justice sustem that is much larger and harsher than those of its northern neighbors.

As detailed in the table that appears after the jump, Indiana’s imprisonment rate (about 460 per 100,000) easily outstrips Wisconsin’s (387) and dwarfs Minnesota’s (178).  Perhaps even more surprisingly, Indiana’s probation population also exceeds Minnesota’s.  My Minnesota-Wisconsin comparison suggested that Wisconsin imprisons many defendants who would get probation in Minnesota, leading to a much smaller probation population in the former than the latter.  But Indiana seems to incarcerate the same way that Wisconsin does, without any accompanying reduction in the probation numbers.

For that reason, Indiana’s total supervised population of 167,872 is the largest of the three states (although Minnesota, with the smallest overall population of three, still has a somewhat larger per capita supervised population, thanks to its enormous per capita probation number).

Indiana also leads the way in crime.

(more…)

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Posted in Cost of Incarceration, Crime Data, Empirical Research, Politics of Crime and Punishment, State Sentencing (Not WI), Wisconsin Sentencing Law | No Comments »

Police Stops Go Up, Citizen Complaints Go Down — What Gives?

Monday, December 5th, 2011

The Milwaukee Police Department has just released some new data on traffic and subject stops. There is a fascinating story here on policing strategy. Since 2007, Milwaukee has experiened a dramatic increase in the number of stops: both traffic and subject stops are up close to 250%. This has been part of a deliberate strategy to increase the number of police-citizen contacts, especially in high-crime neighborhoods. (The MPD has also been very active over the past four years in promoting uncoerced police-citizen contacts, too.) The objectives are to gather intelligence, disrupt criminal activity, and enhance community perceptions of safety in public spaces.

As hoped, crime has indeed gone down considerably since 2007: violent crime is down 24%, and property crime is down 21%. Whether and to what extent the increased-stops strategy has caused the crime drop is uncertain — the MPD has also made some other significant changes in the past four years, and, in any event, crime has been dropping nationwide — but the causal claim strikes me as at least facially plausible. Providing some additional support is a month-by-month breakdown of auto theft and robbery data: in general, in months when stops have lagged, auto thefts and robberies have spiked; in months when stops have spiked, auto thefts and robberies have dropped.

But safety has a cost.

(more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, Fourth Amendment, Milwaukee, Politics of Crime and Punishment, Racial Disparities | No Comments »

U.S. Probation Population Continues to Drop: What’s Happening in Minnesota?

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a new report yesterday showing that the number of adults under community supervision declined by 1.3 percent in 2010.  Entitled Probation and Parole in the United States, 2010, the report summarizes the most recent national data on community supervision.  The decline in 2010 built on a smaller drop in 2009, and may point toward a long-term retreat from the massive increase in the American supervised population that occurred in the 1980′s and 1990′s.

Yet, even following a two-year drop, the supervised population stood at 4,887,900 at the end of 2010, or about one in every 48 adults.  This compares to a supervised population of less than 1.4 million in 1980.

The supervised population includes both probationers and those released from prison to community supervision.  (BJS refers to the latter population as “parolees,” although many jurisdictions no longer use the term “parole.”)  The overall drop in the supervised population was driven entirely by a 1.7 percent decline in probationers; the number of parolees actually increased slightly in 2010.  Like the overall drop, the probation decline in 2010 built on a smaller drop in 2009.

Why are fewer Americans on probation?  The report provides no definitive answers, but some clues are apparent.

(more…)

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Posted in Crime Data, Empirical Research, Parole | No Comments »

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