There is, as the old Neil Young song goes, "Crime in the City."
"There's still crime in the city/Said the cop on the beat/I don't know if I can stop it/I feel like meat on the street."
Stopping crime is difficult. Counting it may be even harder.
SF Weekly recently reported on the San Francisco Police Department's beguiling crime numbers. Yearly statistics printed within the department's annual reports are inconsistent; the robberies or larcenies committed in 2012 and tallied in the 2014 report vary significantly from the 2012 totals printed in the 2013 report. And both numbers vary significantly from the crime statistics printed in the yearly FBI Uniform Crime Reports.
Last month, Budget and Legislative Analyst Harvey Rose completed a report on violence-prevention efforts in the city. Tucked away on Page 13 was a tabulation of year-by-year violent crime; per the report, it went up 31 percent between 2011 and 2013. The source of these statistics was the California Attorney General's Criminal Justice Statistics Center. Perusing these numbers, they don't match either the FBI totals or the SFPD's internal totals.
Three separate tallies of San Francisco crime statistics. And none of them match.
Asked to explain the variance, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza noted that the Feds and the SFPD tabulate crimes differently. An incident in which someone commits a series of crimes (jaywalking, robbery, and murder, for example) will be categorized by the FBI as only the most severe of those crimes (murder). The cops here would tally each one.
Fair enough. But this doesn't explain why both the FBI and Attorney General numbers are, without exception, higher than the SFPD numbers. Esparza also postulated that the state and federal numbers may include crimes reported by other police forces working in this city such as the federal Park Police, BART cops, and college police departments.
A litany of calls made to check on this were not returned. But, if true, it does make sense.
Left unexplained, however, is how crime tallies for past years suddenly grew malleable within the SFPD annual report — and were always altered in such a way to make the present situation look, if not better, then not as bad.
In the end, it's hard to be sure of much. But there's still crime in the city. Count on it.
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