InTucker Magazine

On the Beat with Lt. Schoeppner -January 2021

Lt. D.G. Schoeppner is Tucker’s liaison to the DeKalb County Police Department and can be followed at facebook.com/dgschoeppner or emailed at dgschoeppner@dekalbcountyga.gov.

The Police Department and the City are constantly monitoring crime numbers. Crime numbers from year to year are the yardstick we use to measure success or failure over time. However, this year is slightly different from years past. Believe it or not this difference has nothing to do with the pandemic or any other of the social issues we have faced in 2020. This is a change in the way police agencies calculate crime numbers. These changes don’t really affect crime itself, but it does have an effect on crime statistics. This month, we will talk about how crimes were reported in the past versus how they are now reported.

Since 1930, the FBI has used a system called Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) where local police agencies reported their crime statistics to the federal government. These statistics would then be used to track law enforcement progress and to measure manpower needs all over the country. A system like this is necessary because every state’s laws are subtly different. Where some states have crimes like Murder in the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd degrees, Georgia has “Malice Murder”, “Felony Murder”, and “Manslaughter”. UCR was the method which integrated these different systems together so they could be compared equally. In 1982 the feds sponsored a study of the UCR program. The objective was to create a new system which expanded the crime categories tracked and provided more information about victims and offenders. The result of this was the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). This year the DeKalb Police Department switched over to this system.

The switch has had several obvious impacts on our crime numbers. First is that UCR only counted the most severe crime of any single incident. An example would be that if someone was murdered during a robbery. UCR would have counted that as a murder. Under the NIBRS system, it counts that as a murder and a robbery. Another impact is that crimes are now counted by victim. Where previously if three people were robbed it would be counted as a single robbery, now, under NIBRS, a separate robbery would be counted for each victim. These result in higher overall crime numbers when NIBRS stats are compared to UCR stats.

There are also other categories which include more crimes than they did previously. Under NIBRS, “Aggravated Assaults” now include crimes which UCR did not. For instance, pointing a firearm at someone is a crime called “Pointing a Pistol or Firearm”. This particular crime is a misdemeanor. It is now counted as an Aggravated Assault, even though the weapon was never fired, and no one was injured. NIBRS also changes the way sexual assaults and robberies are counted. Other categories like burglaries and stolen vehicles remain unchanged.

The main takeaway from this is that 2020’s crime numbers can look somewhat inflated compared to years past. To some extent, that may be correct. However, you also have to look at the big picture and know that we are also comparing apples to oranges. The good news is that once we move past this year the numbers will be more alike. We will also have the advantage of more robust statistics to analyze.