Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime. For one, cities and states have highly variable rules on what they record and report. Second, the trend of releasing offenders and understaffing police departments has led to citizens simply not reporting many crimes - what’s the point of reporting anything and losing time if no one investigates and even convicted offenders are just released. Third, the west coast of the US has run the experiment on an alternative approach, restorative justice, and it obviously doesn’t work. The last 15 years are evidence of this - leniency induces crime.

This has nothing to do with the “alt-right” or “conservative news” you brought up. Ironically it seems like you’re making this political, despite complaining about politicization.

View on HN

> The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime.

You’ll need to back that up with facts, not “it seems to me…”. It’s easy to say “the data are wrong, think about it,” but that doesn’t make it true. That’s just a nice way of saying, “of course those people are criminals, just look at them, but there’s a conspiracy making reality say different.”

Exactly. FBI gathers crime statistics from every police department across the nation, and most States also do an independent set of statistics on crime. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that they are lying, and their personal incentive is to the exact opposite, as they receive more funding in times where crime is higher. These institutions already make up the majority of most City and State budgets, its well into the billions. But good luck ever trying to reason with people, crime has been used for emotional manipulation on social media and news for decades now, facts don't matter to most people on this topic.

That's a voluntary program that most large cities have declined to participate in since 2020.

And the 'standardized' form has been messed with so much that increase or decrease for any particular line item is meaningless.

Personally, I know that shootings and other crimes I've reported on my property have been white-washed and don't show up in our city's 'open data' system.

Being 'open' with statistics just means they're much more careful about manipulating them first, or about what data is allowed in.

Anyone doubting this needs to go lookup how many murders New Orleans reported to the fbi for the year 2023, published today: 0.

Hint: they had more than 0 murders in 2023.

I looked this up because it sounded implausible. I used the FBI's crime data explorer tool here: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...

I looked at homicide, location Louisiana, agency New Orleans Police Department for the last two years. There were multiple homicides recorded every month in 2023.

EDIT: I found that the New Orleans Police Department also publishes a daily Major Offense Log here:

https://nopdnews.com/transparency/major-offense-log/

It has a homicide reported as recently as 2024-09-21:

https://nopdnews.com/getattachment/2ed5b866-db79-4edb-aeda-7...

Yea sorry everything was coming up zero because they didn't submit supplemental data, so all filters based on that data (including age and other demographics) come back as zero.

Which is not the way 'nodata' should be returned.

But the point stands- eg Jackson ms didn't submit this year. So your get a 'state total' that doesn't include the majority of the data for the state.

> The data isn’t trustworthy and underestimates the true count of crime.

OK, so on one hand we have crime data going back decades and on the other we have HN user blackeyeblitzar saying "Trust me, bro". I know which one I'm going to believe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com