EDITORIAL: It’s a crime how statistics can be abused

   If it’s true that figures lie and liars figure, there are few opportunities for lying — or at least grossly distorting — that are more inviting than the release of annual crime statistics.
   Every year, the State of New Jersey issues its Uniform Crime Report, offering a detailed statistical record of how many crimes were committed in the past 12 months.
   And every year, the state’s politicians, along with the media, go to great lengths to analyze these statistics, offering pearls of wisdom to explain why crime has gone up (or down), why various policies should be credited (or blamed) for this phenomenon and why people should be pleased (or angry) about the current state of affairs.
   The release last week of the latest UCR had acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco bubbling over with enthusiasm. New Jersey’s crime rate had reached its lowest point in 30 years, he crowed. "As today’s statistics demonstrate, New Jersey continues to be a safer place to live and work," he boasted.
   Indeed, the statewide numbers were encouraging, with rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft and motor-vehicle theft all declining from 1999 to 2000. The murder rate was virtually unchanged, juvenile arrests were down and the aggregate 4 percent drop in violent and nonviolent crime rates surpassed both the national and regional averages.
   But crime statistics, like most other data, are easily oversimplified, and ripe for manipulation. The further one breaks the statistics down — by type of crime, by county, by municipality — the easier it is to exaggerate the significance of the numbers, attaching misplaced credit, assigning improper blame and otherwise drawing mistaken or misleading conclusions about crime.
   For example, while the crime rate fell in 17 of the state’s 21 counties, it went up by 10 percent in Sussex County, 6 percent in Mercer, 2 percent in Burlington and 1 percent in Cape May. Trenton reported increases in all four categories of violent crime — murder (up 75 percent), rape (up 28 percent), robbery (up 11 percent) and aggravated assault (up 5 percent). The number of domestic violence cases reported in Trenton between 1999 and 2000 rose a staggering 233 percent. In light of these numbers, one might wonder whether acting Gov. DiFrancesco truly considers the state capital "a safer place to live and work."
   Then again, the numbers cited above are themselves misleading. Not inaccurate, mind you, but purposely presented in such a way as to dramatize the severity of the situation. For example, the number of murders in Trenton did rise by 75 percent last year — from eight to 14. If you wanted to put it another way, you could say there were only six more murders in Trenton in 2000 than in all of 1999.
   Don’t get us wrong. The UCR is a very useful document; with proper analysis, data on crime can be enormously helpful in spotting trends and parceling out limited law-enforcement resources. But beware of shallow analysis and simplistic explanations. As a matter of public policy, crime is entirely too complex an issue to be done by the numbers.