I’m old so I love old sayings and one of my favorites is one attributed to Mark Twain that says, “There are Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.” His point was that the persuasive power of statistics is often used to bolster weak arguments because they are so easily manipulated.
Nothing I can think of shows the danger of this more than the downgrading of felony charges to misdemeanors using reported crime statistics. This can have very dangerous consequences far beyond just distorting the crime statistics for political purposes. Just watch or read the news to see how many very violent criminals with long arrest records are on the street killing, maiming, raping and committing other horrendous crimes because their past felonies were pleaded down to misdemeanors.
The FBI Uniform Crime Report has two categories of crimes reported to them by law enforcement agencies in the country: 1) Felonies and 2) Misdemeanors.
And it is also very relevant to point out that reporting to the FBI is purely voluntary and there are many law enforcement agencies across the country that do not participate in the FBI’s collection of crime data and those that do can pretty much report or not report whatever they want to since there is really no practical way to check the accuracy of the figures they provide.
Add these two things together and you can see why we should be VERY skeptical when politicians (both sides of the aisle) and news outlets make claims about crime citing the FBI Uniform Crime Reports as their source of information.
Rick Barker
Valencia
