Hudson Reporter Archive

Crime stats – who to believe?

Downtown Jersey City resident Peter O’Reilly says although he feels safe living in the Paulus Hook area with his wife and two kids, he is concerned that crime statistics show an increase, rather than the decrease that city officials touted last year.
O’Reilly has closely studied the arrest data in the Jersey City Police Department’s online crime reports as part of his passion for statistics. O’Reilly, an IT specialist at a New York City firm, has also studied statistics kept by the Jersey City public school system to determine which schools to send his kids and learn more about how the local school system works.
On the bottom right hand side of each report, a box shows how many arrests of adults and juveniles were carried out each month. There has been a decrease in arrests, O’Reilly said.

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“Sometimes we’re good, sometimes we’re lucky – we’ll take both.” – Deputy Chief Peter Nalbach
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In 2009, police made a total of 10,880 adult arrests and 681 juvenile arrests. In 2008, there were 11,055 adult arrests and 956 juvenile arrests.
So how many arrests were made overall in 2010? Hard to say, because they are no longer listed in the 2010 monthly crime reports.
O’Reilly thought it was a coincidence that they were not listed after he questioned a city spokesperson earlier this year about why arrests were down in 2009 from the year before.
His theory is that if arrests go down, crime goes up. O’Reilly argued that if more people were arrested, then fewer criminals would be on the streets committing crime.
“The mayor was claiming crime was going down, and was at a 30-year low,” O’Reilly said. “But I thought it was really sly of the mayor’s office not to mention what the arrest numbers were.”
The arrest numbers for 2010, listed in a state report of the final crime tally for Jersey City provided last week by the police chief’s office, found police made a total of 8,913 adult arrests and 626 juvenile arrests, both numbers considerably down from 2009, leading O’Reilly to conclude that fewer criminals are being apprehended and crime is on the rise.
The trend could also mean that fewer crimes are being committed, but statistics show that in many categories, this is not the case.
When Deputy Chief Peter Nalbach was asked last week why the 2010 arrest data was not available on the web, he said he would ask the police staff. He did not have an answer by press time.

By the numbers … maybe

According to the final 2010 Jersey City crime tally by the State Police’s Uniform Crime Reporting Unit (UCR) – which are reported incidents recorded by police – in 2010, 939 robberies occurred in Jersey City, compared to 873 in 2009, a 7 percent increase. And 1,521 burglaries took place last year, as opposed to 1,393 from the year before, a 9 percent jump. Homicides stayed steady with 25 last year, up one (or 4 percent) from 24 the previous year. Rapes also increased by one from 66 in 2009 to 67 in 2010.
The UCR unit certifies the crime statistics after checking them to make sure they are accurately reported for a particular category.
However, decreases are evident in the other four crime categories that are featured in the Jersey City Police Department’s monthly Uniform Crime Report (UCR) – aggravated assault, larceny (theft), motor vehicle (theft) and arson. The report can be found on the department’s website (www.njjcpd.org).
The 2010 arson totals are 51 as compared to 59 in 2009, a 14 percent drop. Car theft incidents were down 5 percent with 761 last year compared to 800 the year before. Aggravated assault diminished 1 percent from 2009’s sum of 838 to 2010’s amount of 825. And larceny (theft) shrank less than one percent from 3,732 in 2009 to 3,650 in 2010.
The numbers found in the monthly reports on the department’s website, according to Nalbach, are really for police to look at to spot crime trends and know how to deal with them in the future. Nalbach said numbers could change after they are reexamined by the state if they are found to be inaccurately reported.
“When you have something like nine or ten thousand crimes in this city, you may be off by 20 or so,” Nalbach said.
Nalbach said he hopes to see the official crime tally for 2010 on the department’s website in the future.

What’s down goes up

The decreases in aggravated assault, larceny (theft), motor vehicle (theft) and arson range from minimal to fairly significant.
Those decreases coupled with the increases in the four previously mentioned categories suggest the average citizen last year stood a better chance of being robbed, as well as being murdered or raped, but less chance for their house to be burned down, their car stolen, or to be beaten up or pick-pocketed.
Nalbach did not offer any specific reasons for the crime decreases other than “good police work” and “good observation by the public.”
“If we knew why it goes down all the time, we would do it all the time,” Nalbach said. “Sometimes we’re good, sometimes we’re lucky – we’ll take both.”
He added, “We know that we are not going to keep dropping. Sometime you will hit your peak.”
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonreporter.com.

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