Q&A of the Day – In Florida, how much crime is undetected?
Each day I’ll feature a listener question that’s been submitted by one of these methods.
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Today’s entry: Good story (story about technology leading to the detection of more tropical systems), same factors apply in other areas, something to think about, for example, how do you make the crime rate go up? How could you "make" that happen? Simple, hire more police officers... more police officers = more investigations, it's not due to more crime but the increase in officers looking to preserve their job by looking for more of already existing events, the only increase is in reports being filed by the increase in officers. Your point that better tech is creating the "illusion" of more events is a good example of buyer beware.
Bottom Line: Today’s entry is on back of my recent story demonstrating that half of the named storms during the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season would have been undetected prior to satellite technology. That included up to four that wouldn’t have been detected even a few years ago. The point was/is that higher detected activity in the tropics doesn’t necessarily indicate that we’re experiencing more storms and hurricanes – just that we’re more aware of what’s happening. But your point, illustrated through crime and your law enforcement example, is compelling. Is it true that we could manipulate crime levels based upon levels of policing?
First, using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, most crime isn’t reported to local police. According to the Bureau’s database 53% of violent crime and 65% of property crime is never reported. Regardless of policing levels, if crimes aren’t reported, they’re not going to enter official crime rates. That led to me to test your thoughts against Florida’s statistics. Florida has reported a total decline in crime every year since 2008 after having reached a peak in 1998. Here's what’s happened since.
- Population increase: 39%
- Property crime decreased: 45%
- Violent crime decreased: 40%
On the surface that's extremely impressive improvement. But have policing populations kept up with the population increase? According to the FDLE annual report, Florida currently has about 2.5 law enforcement officers per 1,000 people. In 1998, that figure stood at 2.7 per 1,000. In this case that’s a 7% decline in law enforcement officials relative to our population. That has the potential to explain away some of the decline in crime using your line of thinking, but clearly real progress has been made over the past twenty years in our state. The point is this, coming back around to your broader point, operating on assumptions often leads us down a primrose path.
Florida has had a significant decline in crime over the past twenty years that isn’t explained away by policing levels. It’s real improvement. At the same time, most crime still isn’t reported, so we don’t know what we don’t know - but it’s relative progress all the same. In the case of tropical storm and hurricane detection we are detecting more activity than we used to – that's a fact. Is there more activity than there used to be? It’s like unreported crimes. We don’t know what we don’t know. But we do know far more than we used to, and technology is playing a significant role in knowing more about most of what’s going on in the world around us. The challenge is wading through political agendas to simply consider facts.