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UCR for Police Officers? Yes!
Edward Claughton
We Hate To Say It But....We Told You So.
Yet another accusation of cooking the books has emerged in law enforcement- this time
in Milwaukee (victim of watchdog journalism gone awry?). I find myself writing about
this more and more lately, unfortunately for the wrong reasons.
Policeone.com recently published "Fudge Factor: cooking the books on crime stats", in
which Lt. Col. Dave Grossman was quoted as saying he believes the biggest problem
facing law enforcement today is altered crime stats. Wow. That is a big statement and
one which PRI disagrees with. Nonetheless, we have been teaching over and over that
we officially endorse and recommend teaching officers a little bit about how UCR
works. We have stated in our classes that, incredibly, an officer can go through an entire
police academy and not even learn one thing about UCR- the nations premier system for
measuring crime.
In one class I taught, a police commander engaged me in an argument stating that recruits
and rookie officers don't need to learn about it. How about another Wow. We disagree.
And so do some other agencies who are quickly learning that cops need to know about
UCR. Lo and behold, Milwaukee PD, Kansas City PD and many other police
departments have changed course and decided it was prudent to train officers in basic
UCR information. That's the right decision.
Following an internal audit that found problems in the crime reporting process, Kansas
City police in 2009 trained roughly 1,500 officers on the incident-based reporting
guidelines, Kansas City police Capt. Greg Volker said. "We are better for it," Volker
said. "Our officers understand what a (simple assault) is and what an (aggravated assault)
is. We didn't just make a few people accountable, we made everybody accountable."
While we think the FBI UCR training is a start, it is not designed for sworn personnel
who need a great and easy to understand overview of the program, not a step by step
guide on UCR reports. Our class has received excellent reviews and after much research
on crime stats, UCR and cooking the books we developed this class to help agencies
prevent problems with the numbers and to produce accurate stats.
By the way cooking the books is not a widespread problem. In fact, inaccurate statistics
are caused most often by factors which are completely unintentional. Widespread,
systematic efforts to falsify crime stats are the lore of conspiracy theorists- not reality.
Agencies should however be certain that the employ of COMPSTAT is done
appropriately and not in a manner which tempts the weak.
© PRI Management Group 2012
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