Details matter

About that murder rate

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

—Mark Twain, who attributed the phrase to Benjamin Disraeli, apparently with no basis whatsoever, perhaps just to give it a little authority.

AT LEAST a couple of decades ago, pre-Internet, a writer of little note had a brilliant idea: Take a map of the United States, pick out the college towns, and overlap that map with another of crime stats. Then rank the college towns based on which ones were the highest risk, and publish that sucker!

A whole book dedicated to showing parents where they shouldn’t send their kids for university.

And one of the top places that you should avoid like pink pork was . . . Hammond, La., home of Southeastern Louisiana University in the Florida parish of Tangipahoa. Wha . . . ?

It turns out that the writer retrieved his stats from the FBI’s “uniform” code, which was about as uniform as . . . what’s the opposite of uniform? Police precincts around the nation have different ways of reporting crimes, if they report crimes to the feds at all. In one city, a homicide might be a murder, but in the next city the same crime might be reported as a manslaughter. And what’s an assault in one place might be called a battery in another. Better yet, if an armed robber holds up a liquor store with six people in it, one jurisdiction would call it one armed robbery, and another would call it six. And in most places, the cops tell the FBI not much.

But poor Hammond, La., apparently had a police force that took things like reporting seriously, and reported itself right up to the top of the national list.

Hammond, that infamous well of vipers and vermin.

All this comes to mind while reading the story about the number of murders in Arkansas last year. That number jumped 34 percent, which is bad enough. That’s above the national average to boot. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released this week, the national average is a 29 percent rise in “non-negligent manslaughter” in the rest of these several states. So what’s wrong with Arkansas?

This state reported 310 homicides in 2020, compared with 232 the year before. Which is a crying shame. Emphasis on crying. But let’s not overlook this paragraph in Teresa Moss’ article Tuesday morning:

“Data used by the FBI comes from information reported through the system by law enforcement agencies. Data submitted encompasses only 53 percent of the nation’s population, according to the FBI website. Arkansas law enforcement had a higher response, with the data covering about 92 percent of the state’s population.”

So when comparing Arkansas to the rest of the country on these matters, let’s keep that much in mind. Details matter.

So do these details: Pulaski County, Little Rock and North Little Rock all saw increases in homicides from 2019 to 2020. From 2019 to 2020, it breaks down thusly: Little Rock from 36 to 49; North Little Rock, from 12 to 20; and the county from 56 to 89. Other states aside, when comparing one jurisdiction to itself from the year before, that’s a good indicator of what’s really happening. And what’s really happening in Arkansas isn’t good.

One criminology professor quoted in the story said the pandemic might have something to do with the spike in killings across the country. And so does the “police legitimacy crisis” of the last year. Maybe fewer people are calling the cops for help, or fewer people are calling the cops to give their help on a criminal matter in their neighborhoods.

Again, from the article: “Victims in Arkansas were mostly likely to be between the ages of 20 and 29, according to the FBI report. The crimes often happened at a residence with the relationship of the suspect unknown. A handgun was the most common weapon used in homicides, the report says.”

One day, perhaps, the feds will figure out a way to make their statistics uniform in fact, not just in name. And then the states really can be compared to each other. But that’s little comfort to those of us in Arkansas who keep seeing articles in the paper about those gunned down in the streets, or on back roads. Something’s happening here. What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

Unlike some homicides, these numbers aren’t justifiable.