FBI Crime Data and Hinsdale, NH

The Hinsdale ex police chief hit me up with the Hinsdale, NH crime stats or data. "It seen no rise in crime" is what he said. Any professional level police executive would tell you the FBI's crime data isn't auditable. Its a totally voluntary system, there is political fallout if you report the bad news of crime. Plus the police don't have the money to report all crime to the FBI.   

The Boston Globe is writing this up in a controversial prose in order the boost circulation.  A ethical paper would have disclosed the shortcoming of the FBI's crime data and pounder if the data was trustable.

Stats on drugs, race refute Maine governor

PORTLAND, Maine — No law enforcement statistics even come close to backing up Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s assertion that blacks and Hispanics account for ‘‘90-plus percent’’ of heroin-trafficking arrests in Maine.

LePage, who previously told the Portland NAACP chapter to ‘‘kiss my butt’’ and blamed out-of-state drug dealers for impregnating ‘‘young white’’ girls, sparked another racial uproar when he said Aug. 24 that data he’d collected indicates out-of-state black and Hispanics accounted for ‘‘90-plus percent’’ of heroin-trafficking arrests in Maine.

FBI data contradict his assertion, and a criminologist called the governor’s data ‘‘laughable.’’ Meanwhile, members of the African-American community in Maine, the whitest state, fear his comments strengthen racial stereotypes and tacitly approve of racial profiling.

‘‘I think this fear-mongering, and these us-against-them kind of statements, do not advance the community conversation, do not address the real issue of drug abuse,’’ said the Rev. Kenneth I. Lewis Jr., pastor at the Green Memorial A.M.E. Church, Maine’s oldest African-American congregation, in Portland.

The Maine Department of Public Safety doesn’t include race when compiling and analyzing crime data. And the most recent crime data from the FBI suggest the governor’s claim doesn’t pass muster.

The FBI data show that blacks accounted for 14 percent of a total of 1,211 drug sale and manufacturing arrests and 7.4 percent of 5,791 total drug arrests in Maine in 2014, the most recent numbers available.

Broken down by type of offense, the data showed that blacks accounted for 35.5 percent of arrests for selling opium-derived drugs including heroin, morphine and cocaine, and 26 percent when synthetic narcotics including most prescription narcotics were included in the tally. The FBI doesn’t include a category for Hispanics in its statistics...