TCinVA on Ballistic Radio

[NH Shooter]

This one happened in our town, a few miles from where we live;

http://www.unionleader.com/apps/pbcs...130929357&NL=1

[NH Shooter]

What Wayne said! When I’m milling about the home property, this is my minimal kit. If I leave, I add a full size pistol and a spare mag.

This is my standard carry at home and when out and about, which I'm quite comfortable with;

[Tom Givens]

Rob- I’ll save you the trouble of looking for a check.

The problem lies in the source of various statistics. After spending 25 years in patrol or investigative work I can tell you there is far more violent crime, and violent crime against completely innocent victims, than you imagine.

Part of the confusion comes from the adoption of “incident based reporting” some time ago. In the past, under “offense based reporting” if a subject robbed 5 people at gunpoint, that was five armed robberies. Now it is one armed robbery. So, the armed robbery rate is now lower.

The FBI UCR report lists total crimes each year, using the incident based reporting model. Another problem is that the UCR system is voluntary—police agencies are not required to report all or any data to the FBI. Thus, their totals are way, way under-reported. The UCR shows about 12,500 murders a year in recent years, while experts think the actual number of criminal homicides in the US is closer to 40,000 a year. The same under-reporting applies to other violent crimes.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics is a part of the Justice Department, separate from the FBI. According to the BJS, in the US in 2006 there were 5,585,620 violent crimes. For that year, the BJS lists 1,209,730 Aggravated Assaults. A majority of those would probably justify a lethal self defense response. The BJS says there were 255,630 Forcible Rapes in 2006. The 2011 numbers rose to 5.8 million, one for every 30 adults.

In Memphis alone in 2013 there were 154 homicides. That number sounds like low odds. That is because of a very busy and very proficient Class 1 Trauma Center there, who treated 3,100 people for gunshots in 2013 alone. In Memphis in 2013 there were 9,165 Aggravated Assaults, according to the MPD, which is an average of 25.1 per day.

I’ve had dozens of students involved in legitimate self defense shootings. These are people with clean records and who possess handgun carry permits. They were typically going about their daily routine when attacked.

[jlw]

Here's another fact about the UCR data:

Congress does not have the authority to order local and state governments to report crime data. Since they have no stick, they have to resort to the carrot. The reporting of crime data is tied to the receipt of federal grants. No reporting = no grants. Therefore, if an agency isn't going to pursue federal grant money, it really has no incentive to report its data. Yes, there are agencies that don't pursue federal grants.

The same premise applies to many other things such as the .08 BAC for DUIs, 21-year-old drinking age, and mandatory seatbelt laws being tied to federal highway funds. Another example is federal education money. States don't have to adopt the "No Child Left Behind" standards; they just forgo federal education dollars if they don't.

The data is simply not complete as there as the reporting isn't universal, and there really isn't much if any repercussion for cooking the books either. A burglary can easily be reported as a theft by taking.

Even when there is no attempt to manipulate the data, there are crimes that simply aren't reported to LE and crimes that haven't been discovered yet. We have a missing person case right now that is several years old. Was the dude murdered and buried somewhere, or did he simply disappear on his own volition?

[peterb]

Just stumbled on a quote that seemed appropriate to this thread:

“There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange, what looks strange is thought improbable, what is improbable need not be considered seriously.”

Thomas Schelling

[John Hearne]

I can't provide a cite right now, but the CDC consistently reports higher homicide numbers than the FBI. CDC uses a different methodology than the self-reporting of LE agencies....

[Robert Mitchum]

I remember Hayes and Komisarjevsky.

It was the perfect Job for my personality back than ..had the pleasure of bouncing one of them off a wall years ago.
The difference between myself and those two was ... I was bigger stronger and more violent than they where.

[TCinVA]

Tom and JLW hit the high points nicely, Rob. Other things to consider:

The typical police department in this country has less than 10 sworn personnel in it. The officers working in it cover large geographic areas and their budget is low...they are not sending crime statistics in to the FBI.

There is a significant incentive to not have reports of violent crimes reported as it tends to hurt the political aspirations of elected officials as well as police chiefs. As a result, there are many crimes that are never even entered into the system. In the episode I briefly mentioned an occasion where a ruse for a home invasion happened to me...and yet when the police arrived they did precisely beans about it. No crime actually took place. They wrote down some information, got a description of the people involved and that was the end of it.

When someone tried to rob me at a gas station a couple of years ago, I got as far as beginning my drawstroke...but no report was taken. Nobody else witnessed it and they didn’t bother to consult the gas station’s surveillance to get any video or photos of the dude who attempted it. He didn’t pull a gun and I didn’t pull mine, and dude went fleeing into the night.

No harm, no foul...and most importantly, *no statistic.*

The officer who responded to my robbery attempt asked me if I was *really* sure someone had tried to rob me.

Another happy tidbit about the UCR, there are departments that submit numbers to the FBI, but those numbers are not the same numbers that the department keeps internally. You can see an example of this by looking at Baltimore’s crime stats website where they say on the top of the page that the numbers are not necessarily reflective of what gets sent to the FBI, and any comparison with the UCR is “strictly prohibited”

Geography and lifestyle certainly play a significant role in one’s likelihood of being the victim of a crime. I’m one of the people who should be statistically immune given my location and lifestyle choices. And yet I have been to the point of touching a gun on multiple occasions in attempts at the kinds of crimes we carry guns to defend against.

It isn’t in the interest of the system for people to understand how common violent crime really is or to understand that their lifetime risk of being the victim of some sort of violent crime (rape, robbery, aggravated assault or murder) is something like 1 in 4 people. (Bureau of Justice Statistics did a projection on that some years ago that put the lifetime risk as higher than that)

If people understood how the criminal justice system really works they’d burn it to the ground.

[jlw]

There are more than 18,000 LE agencies in the US. There isn't a singular LE culture or entity. Compare it to any town in America having a Baptist Church, a Methodist Church, a Presbyterian Church, etc. They all do pretty much the same thing, but they do it differently.

You have the political components in play too. City council members don't typically go down to the sewage plant and start turning knobs on the control panels, but they will jump all into the PD's operations, which is why I like working for a strong Sheriff.

Finally, you can't discount the part the prosecutor plays in the process. Sure, the cop could possibly have arrested the folks trying to set up TC for a home invasion, but then the prosecutor looks at the case, decides it's not provable in court, and dismisses it only for the perps to now sue the cop.

[Larry Sellers]

Cheshire, the town in which the Petit incident was staffed with 3 cars on during a day shift (it's been years, things may be different) and were allowed to drop down to 2 cars after half the tour was over and the supervisor would go on the road.

There were a multitude of officers on scene that morning, responding from all over the town from road jobs, investigations etc and yet the outcome was still the same. I am still very close friends with many of them to this day and recently shot at CTT Solutions course with one of them. One thing however did stick with me: Once Hayes and Komisarjevsky crashed the family's Chrysler Pacifica into the two cruisers, ultimately stopping their escape , the officer who took Komisarjevsky into custody told me of the word exchange he had with him.

As he approached him with pistol drawn, the coward could be heard repeating "just kill me, just kill me, just kill me"

I'm not sure what that relays to the story, but it shows to me how within a split second he could switch gears from the worst human being I've ever met and spoken at, to a frightened child......

Much like the two he had a hand in ending their lives.

I've contemplated putting my experience into a document, I just am not aware of the best way in which to do so. If someone wouldn't mind sending me a PM that has experience with such a thing I'd appreciate it. Others have reached out for my account of the day/night and I want to be able to share it but would like to do it with consistency and not necessarily make it a searchable document on the internet.

Apologies for the drift.