US CRIME DATA COLLECTION HAPHAZARD AT BEST

new challenges not only fighting them, but keeping track of them. Politicians often tout crime declines without acknowledging the rise of new cyber crimes.

Detectives only learned of the “cheating husband” scheme from faithful spouses who were not victims. The crime did not fit into any existing category, and since police had made no arrests, they had no statistics to feed to a national crime database in Washington that can prepare other jurisdictions for the scheme.

Many of the offenses are not even counted when major crimes around the nation are tallied. Among them: identity theft; sexual exploitation; ransomware attacks; Fentanyl purchases over the Dark Web; human trafficking for sex or labor; revenge porn; credit-card fraud; child exploitation; and gift or credit-card schemes that gangs use to raise cash for their traditional operations or vendettas.

The rise of the crimes flies in the face of the proclamations of politicians who declare crime an all but defeated societal ill.

“It’s the old iceberg metaphor,” said Nola Joyce, a former deputy commissioner of Philadelphia’s police department. “What we know about is above the surface. But in terms of value, and in terms of harm, a lot of that crime is below the surface.”

Joyce is working with others on a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to modernize local and federal crime-classification systems.

New solutions are a priority, too, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and progressive police commanders. They say that without timely, accurate data on crime, criminal justice leaders cannot see and respond coherently to national trends or make informed policy and spending decisions or tailor deployment strategies to best battle them.

In the 1980s, the FBI, with Bureau of Justice Statistics, tried to improve the reporting by building the National Incident-based Reporting System to capture deeper levels of data across more categories. It created, for instance, “crimes against a person” which includes: assault, murder, kidnapping, abduction and sexual offenses. Each act is counted separately, within an incident or a crime that encompasses several criminal elements.

But 40 years later, data collection is still haphazard as policing agencies that protect just 31 percent of the country’s population volunteer to abide by the deeper reporting standards. (An example: There is no national database of police officers’ use of deadly physical force.) Still, the FBI is charging forward, vowing to move fully to its 1980s-era vision by 2021.