Some NH Towns and Cities a No-Show on Fed Crimes
WASHINGTON – New Hampshire’s violent crime rate dropped last year, but remains significantly higher than it was in the late 1990s, according to crime statistics released last week by the FBI.
The violent crime rate declined 5.3 percent in 2002, which translated to 88 fewer murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults than in 2001.
But New Hampshire law enforcement agencies reported 897 more violent crimes last year than in 1999, the statistics show. Taking the state’s growing population into account, that still meant a 67 percent increase in violent crime rate in just three years.
However, with several of New Hampshire’s biggest cities – including Concord, Nashua and Salem–and many smaller towns not reporting, those statistics represent only 76 percent of the state’s population, the data show. The result is a picture of crime in the Granite State that some experts say might not be entirely accurate.
“You’ve got a small percentage change and a lot of missing data,” said Jim Lynch, chairman of the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University here. A quarter of the population “is a lot not to cover,” he said.
Lynch, who has worked with the data for years, said not counting several large cities, which tend to have higher crime rates, can make statewide rates appear lower than they actually are.
It’s a trend he said has been showing up on a national scale, too. The national reporting rate has dropped from about 95 percent of the total population in the mid-90s to 85 percent now, he said.
The FBI issues what is known as Crime in the United States every fall based on crime statistics voluntarily reported by over 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the country. Usually, New Hampshire and other states send data to the FBI once a month.
Experts often have criticized the reports because they’re voluntary, because they reflect only reported crime and because they summarize complex crime data into nine simple categories. And with states strapped for cash in recent years, reporting operations have often received short shrift, leading to spottier data, Lynch said.
Even the FBI declines to compare crime rates among states.
“They don’t have much control over the system,” said Lynch, noting that Florida has been known to drop out every few years. “It’s far-flung and it’s voluntary.”
New Hampshire’s violent crime rate dropped from 170 per 100,000 people in 2001 to 161 in 2002. In raw numbers, New Hampshire reported 2,144 violent crimes in 2001 and 2,056 the following year, compared to 1,159 in 1999, when the rate per 100,000 people was 96.5.
New Hampshire’s murder rate, however, was 40 percent lower last year than it was in 1999 – from 1.5 per 100,000 to 0.9. Though the murder rate was also down, by 33 percent, in 2002, that drop was caused by an increase in population. There actually were the same number of murders — seven– in the past two years and 18 in 1999. Robbery and rape rates were also down slightly last year, but up from 1999.
During that three-year period, the state’s population grew by about 74,000 to 1,275,056, a 6 percent increase.
Unlike some places, where Lynch said reporting has gotten worse, New Hampshire’s reporting rate actually improved last year. In 2001, the FBI received reports from cities and towns that encompassed just 65.8 percent of the state’s population.
Nashua did not report last year because it was in the midst of transferring to a more detailed reporting system, said Karen Lamb of the New Hampshire State Police, who is in charge of coordinating New Hampshire’s data for the FBI. She said Salem has not reported since 1994. Salem and Concord officials could not be reached for comment.
And although the FBI does not rank states based on their reporting rate, a number of them did better than New Hampshire. In 2002, California reported at a rate of 100 percent, Utah and Maine at 99 percent.
“New Hampshire has one of the lowest reporting rates in the country,” said Mark Thompson, director of administration in the New Hampshire Department of Justice. “However, that is only half the story, because the good news is that we’re increasing tremendously.”
Thompson attributed the lag in reporting to a shift by many New Hampshire agencies to a more detailed and potentially more accurate reporting system.
“There are holes in the reporting fabric, and you’ve got to be very careful about what conclusions you draw from these data if you’re not certain if they’re really representative of the entire state,” said Ted Kirkpatrick, director of Justiceworks, a research group at the University of New Hampshire.
Kirkpatrick said data can accurately portray broad trends in crime but cannot be used to compare states to one another.
“The one thing that you can be pretty certain about is that crime relative to other parts of the country is extremely low in New England, particularly in the three northern New England states,” he said. But, “You get into this: ‘Well we show that we’re actually lower than Maine,’ ” he said. “And I don’t think the quality of data allows us to show that with certainty.”
