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FBI Crime Stats Are Not Its Best Work
The FBI's crime reporting program is considered the final word on crime trends in the United States, but the agency rarely audits police agencies providing the information and when it does its reviews are too cursory to identify deep flaws.
In each of the past five years, FBI auditors have reviewed crime statistics at less than 1% of the roughly 17,000 departments that report data, a Journal Sentinel examination of FBI records has found. In all, they've audited as many as 652 police agencies during that time, or less than 4% of the total.
And a survey of police departments in the 30 largest U.S. cities found that nearly two-thirds have not been audited in the past five years.
Of those, six departments - including Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Seattle - have never been reviewed by the FBI since the auditing program began 15 years ago.
That lack of scrutiny allows cases of undercounting of crimes, such as violent assaults that were not included in the crime rate since 2006, to go unnoticed and gives the public a false sense of the true level of crime, criminal justice experts said.
"It would be more candid to not do any (audits)," said Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "This way, at least you're not offering any pretense of checking on the validity of the stats. If you are going to do that little, then why do it? You either do it systematically, or you don't do it at all."
He called the audit process a "useful fig leaf."
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