WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE?

Murder down in big Texas cities in 2017, violent crime up in some

By Scott Henson

Grits for Breakfast
December 29, 2017

As the year closes out, the Brennan Center projected murder and violent crime rates for 2017 based on reporting from the nation's 30 largest cities, including six in Texas. They found that, in aggregate, both had declined from 2016 levels. Looking closer at Texas' data, complicated the story. Here are the changes in murder rates for the Texas cities in the survey:

Houston: -20.5%
San Antonio: -13.5%
Dallas: -1.7%
Austin: -27%
Fort Worth: +0.1%
El Paso: +29.4%

The increase in El Paso's murder rate was from 2.9 to 3.8 per 100,000 residents and represented an increase of 6 murders over the 2016 total.

Murders, though, are rare events occurring in relatively small numbers, which is why it's never ideal to look at one or two years in isolation. Overall, murder rates peaked in 1991 and have declined steadily ever since, with a couple of one or two year upward hiccups, as occurred in 2015 and 2016. But 2017 renewed that downward trend with what Brennan projects will be the second lowest rate for murders overall since the 1990s.

Other violent crime rates, however, rose slightly in Texas' largest cities, despite a slight overall national decline. For the same cities, here are Brennan's projections for year-over-year changes in violent-crime rates from 2016 to 2017:

Houston: +8.8%
San Antonio: +4%
Dallas: +4/8%
Austin: -7.5%
Fort Worth: +5%
El Paso: -7.8%

Now, these are single-digit increases in four of six cities following two decades of decline, so take them with a grain of salt, but it does buck the national trend, which saw violent crime decline 0.6% overall.

When you look at the data city-by-city, however, that average masks wide variation. For example, though declines in Austin and El Paso look quite good, some large cities posted even larger reductions, including: Columbus, Ohio (-12.4%), Indianapolis (-17.9%) and Washington, D.C. (-27.5%). And some quite large cities like New York (-7.4%), Detroit (-9.6%), and Boston (-9.7%) witnessed crime declines equal to or greater than any Texas jurisdiction.

What to make of this jumble? Grits honestly can't say. In most cases, imputing causation to the yearly vicissitudes of crime data (much less any partisan implications), IMO amounts to a fool's errand. I don't believe the new Houston Police Chief, Art Acevedo, can take credit for the decline in murders in his town, for example, nor do I believe he is responsible for the increase in violent crime on his watch. Crime rates measure societal trends which are bigger than the interests or actions of the government, including the police.

In fact, about the only thing you can tell from anyone's interpretation of short-term crime data at this historical moment are the hopes, aspirations, and interests of the interpreter. Crime rates have been dropping for a long time, but nobody knows whether or not we've hit the bottom. Are increases in violent crime rates in those four cities a blip, or the beginning of a longer-term bounce that will sustain over multiple years? No one but a demagogue can do aught but guess, and anybody who does so without offering lots of caveats is most certainly promoting an agenda.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Scott, please let me suggest you take a deep breath before you believe the crime stats that cities float around.

Several years ago professors John Eterno and Eli Silverman did a study of New York police crime stats. They found that NYPD routinely manipulated those stats to make the city look safer. They even had the gall to list forcible rapes - and this is no joke - as illegal entry.

Some years back, Houston PD listed several deaths as suicides even though the victims had bee shot multiple times. And just recently a Los Angeles police captain revealed that LAPD, like NYPD, was manipulating crime stats to make the City of Angels (?) look better.

And then there are those rosy Texas parole stats. There is no way Texas parole failures can be anywhere near as low as claimed when the rest of the states have failure rates of 50-60 percent.

Benjamin Disraeli may not have said it, but there is no denying that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Happy New Year!