COURT HOUSE – Crime statistics for 2015 are in, were you affected?
New Jersey State Police recently released its Uniform Crime Report (UCR). The document depicts various types of crimes reported to the state, including comparisons to 2014 crime totals, and other factors that tend to demonstrate effectiveness of law enforcement as well as the state of public safety in Cape May County.
The Herald analyzed data to compare crime statistics in this county to statewide statistics; it also focused on a sampling of crime data for individual municipalities to provide some perspective to the local crime rates as compared to 2014 local crime rates.
In general, Cape May County got good news about property crime, as did the entire state.
How Do We Know Crime’s Down?
The FBI is responsible to collect and analyze crime reports nationwide through the Uniform Crime Reporting System. The UCR creates standard definition of crimes that all states and municipalities adhere to; this ensures that a burglary in Arizona is defined the same as a burglary in New Jersey.
Each law enforcement agency in the state must report its Part I (serious crimes, including homicide, rape, robbery, burglary, theft, etc.) offenses to their respective State Police departments which, in turn, forward data to the FBI.
Part II offenses include narcotics and other less serious crimes; these offenses must also be reported throughout the nation according to the New Jersey State Police.
The purpose of all crime reporting is to assess the state of public safety in communities, states and nation, and to conduct crime analysis of patterns of illegal activity at those levels.
That analysis will inform intelligence/data and directed policing tools that are essential to modern law enforcement programs, especially those tasked with preventing future crimes.
County, Local Results
In 2015, New Jersey experienced a statewide reduction in most categories of crime compared to 2014.
Burglary experienced a 17 percent reduction, with 14 percent of those offenses cleared by arrest or other method. The “clearance rate” is essentially the “batting average” for a law enforcement agency that denotes what percentage of the crimes reported that police were able to solve through investigation and arrest by police on the street.
There are also “exceptional” clearances where crimes are “cleared” without arrest, such as when crime victims refuse to prosecute, or an offender dies, etc.
Larceny/theft experienced a 9.6 percent decrease with a 22 percent clearance rate.
Individual municipalities in Cape May County also experienced lower property crime rates. Smaller municipalities cannot rely too heavily on percentages of increase or decrease to evaluate their crime environment because low populations create deceptively low or high percentages of crime reports.
For example when one town reports two burglaries in 2014 and four burglaries in 2015, statistically, it appears a crime wave caused a 100 percent crime increase, when the actual raw numbers do not support that conclusion.
Lower Township experienced a 17 percent reduction in burglary with a 27 percent clearance rate, a 6 percent reduction in theft with a 9 percent clearance rate.
Capt. Martin Biersbach of Lower Township Police Department advised that Lower Township does not yet use NIBRS because of the anticipated new dispatch system called “Infoshare,” and that Lower is waiting to purchase crime analysis software because the new CAD (Computer Assisted Dispatch) system will influence those purchases.
Ocean City experienced 23 percent reduction in burglary with a 7.8 percent clearance rate, and a 6.5 percent increase in theft with a 13 percent clearance rate.
Middle Township experienced a 25 percent decrease in burglary with a 21 percent clearance rate, and a 7 percent decrease in theft with a 46 percent clearance rate.
Sea Isle City experienced a 52 percent increase in burglary with 13 percent clearance rate.
It should be noted that, as stated, some percentages may appear dramatically above or below a norm due to the small number of actual incidents being calculated.
For instance, Sea Isle City experienced 25 burglaries in 2014 compared to 38 recorded in 2015. This accounts for the 52 percent increase. Theft rate was virtually unchanged with a 3.2 percent clearance rate.
Stone Harbor experienced an 11 percent decrease in burglary with an 18 percent clearance rate, and a 24 percent increase in theft, with a 20 percent clearance rate.
Wildwood experienced a 21 percent decrease in burglary with a 15.7 percent clearance rate, the theft rate decreased by 19 percent with a 15.6 percent clearance rate.
Role of Local Police
Most police and law enforcement professionals agree that property crime patterns go hand-in-hand with patterns of illegal narcotics activity; illegal drug users rely on a lifetime of committing crimes like burglary, theft and shoplifting to finance their habits.
Crime analysts can literally track the course of narcotics activity in a community by analyzing certain kinds of property crimes, types of items stolen, and the presence of nearby pawn or second-hand stores in a given geographical area.
The opposite is also true in that patterns of narcotics arrests and activity will also reveal patterns of property crime occurrences in those areas.
So called “hot spots” of crime are identified and receive extra attention by police who may deploy plain clothes officers, surveillance techniques, intelligence activities, and other policing tools to nip those trouble spots in the bud.
Chief William Mastriana of Lower Township Police Department stated that crime analysis at the agency level is done by the detectives; no “crime analyst” currently exists but he is considering designating one for Lower Township.
He pointed out that the County Prosecutor’s Office currently looks at crime on the county level, and disseminates crime pattern information to all municipalities to provide a wider perspective to individual municipalities.
Some examples would be patterns of burglary where the pattern extends across municipal boundaries; in his case, there is a geographical synergy between Middle Township and Lower that makes close coordination and cooperation between those agencies a must.
The county also tracks narcotics “packaging” that identifies a dealer’s product just like any product that is seen in a supermarket that features a logo and unique packaging for customers to identify.
Mastriana stated “We attend monthly meetings with Middle Township to exchange information such as narcotics packaging, property crime patterns and other useful enforcement information.”
Chief Christopher Leusner of Middle Township Police Department agreed that property crime and narcotics activity go hand-in-hand.
Leusner employs one of his sergeants as a part-time crime analyst; he looks for patterns and trends from daily crime reports as part of his responsibility.
“We look for repeat offenders because we have learned that a relatively small number of criminals can be responsible for a large percentage of our criminal behavior” he added.
As an example, he noted that “We see that a small half-square mile segment of the Rio Grande section of Middle Township is responsible for 35 percent of the township’s crime.” The township comprises 72 square miles in area.
The Herald also contacted Sgt. Luis A. Ponte of New Jersey State police UCR Unit to explain how crime data can be analyzed.
Ponte stated that there are no 2015 narcotics data available at present because, as a Part II offense, narcotics arrest data lags Part I data (homicides, robberies, thefts etc.)
He agreed that it would be much better to be able to analyze property crimes statistics together with narcotics statistics based on the relationship between the two, but until more agencies begin using National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) that is more detailed and not summary based, that sort of sophisticated analysis will be difficult.
NIBRS is a newer crime reporting system that counts crime incidents differently than the UCR summary based system.
Under UCR, agencies report only the most serious crime that occurs during a particular incident such as an armed robbery. Any other crimes that occurred during the robbery, such as theft or assault are not reported.
The NIBRS system is more detailed in that the same robbery “incident” will also report the theft that occurred during that armed robbery, plus any assault or weapons offenses.
Such detailed crime reports produce a clearer picture of crime in the nation, state and communities.
Ponte stated that only 38 percent of all law enforcement agencies use NIBRS because it is more time consuming than the UCR system. It became clear that any meaningful crime analysis must occur at the individual police agency level.
To contact Jim McCarty, email jmccarty@cmcherald.com.
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