Stats static: Public needs clearest possible depiction of extent of crime

Yet again the mayor and city manager and councilman Bevan Foster found themselves at odds Monday night.

Unlike previous dust-ups in the course of the city doing its business, however, we believe we understand where Foster was coming from with his most recent argument. In the past, we've only loosely had the sense we might have known what he was driving at.

As simply as we can state it, here is what happened: Recent assessments ranking the city on very opposite lists came out using data compiled from the police department's annual Uniform Crime Report, or UCR, which is a batch of compiled crime stats the city reports on a yearly basis to the FBI. The UCR tracks things such as the number of homicides, rapes, assaults and other violent crimes, as well as property crimes, and the rates of change in percentages from the outgoing year to the year prior.

Standard stuff.

Foster's immediate point was that the mayor, in a presentation he gave in December at a "State of the Community" address, cited both reports as taking from the same pool of data, and making the example that anyone can take a set of statistics and skew them to "mean" whatever end they choose.

One report ranked the city as one of the most dangerous in the state, the other ranked Goldsboro as a great place to live. (We are paraphrasing here, of course.)

The issue Foster had was that one study used UCR data from Goldsboro from 2015, and the other took its data from the UCR of 2016.

So, Foster was saying the mayor was mistaken in his example that data can be skewed, because he was confusing two sets of data as one.

Fine and great, no big deal. If Foster is right, the mayor made a mistake for which he said Monday night he meant no harm and had no nefarious intent.

There is a larger point to be made here, however, and that is, city manager Scott Stevens brought up the fact that the city is now using a new crime stat reporting agency, Spillman, which reduces by the nature of the way crimes are reported, the number of incidents that get reported from a single instance of crime.

The example he gave was if one person shoots into a house and 10 people are inside, that used to be counted as 10 aggravated assaults. Under the new reporting method, it counts as one aggravated assault with 10 victims.

You can see how, over the span of one year, that might greatly reduce Goldsboro's crime rates.

The debate then shifted to whether or not that was an honest and accurate way of reporting crime, to which Stevens said the city spoke to other municipalities and found that is how many of them are reporting crimes now.

Foster said he, too, had contacted other cities and the word he received was not as favorable. Some cities that use the Spillman method are unhappy with the results, he said.

So the question becomes for us, the residents of Goldsboro, whether or not we want crime to reduce or do we simply want the appearance of reduced crime. Because, whether you back the city or Foster in the current argument, you have to admit the following:

Say we have the exact same number of incidents in 2018 that we did in 2017, but under the new crime reporting method, the number of incidents reported are fewer given the change. Should that hold true, then despite the fewer numbers, crime has not really been reduced.

Our hope is that the city will soon give us a better explanation of why this new reporting system will actually, and not theoretically, bring the crime statistics in line with the reality.

If the numbers were overblown before, that is one thing, but the semantics just as much as the statistics, matter here.

Published in Editorials on January 9, 2018 11:11 PM