Last Christmas, Jeff Green of The Oakland Press in Pontiac, Mich., learned an important lesson: Do it yourself. In the Christmas to New Year's lull, Green wrote a series of stories on growth and crime with fellow reporter Kathy Gray. Green got the jump on his competitors by circumventing the FBI and going straight to his local police departments.
Over the course of several weeks, Green asked about 60 law enforcement agencies in Oakland County for their tallies in eight crime categories: murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft and arson. Green pooled his numbers with reporters from a local television station.
Using his IBM laptop, Green put together his own database on Excel 5.0 and Fox Pro 2.6. He estimated it took seven hours to clean up and track down errors in the data. Green found that many data discrepancies stemmed from the structure of the police department.
Overall, Green said, his data was cleaner and more accurate than the crime statistics from the FBI. "It's better than the FBI database because the FBI has blanks and stuff," Green said. "If you are going to start comparing Community A to Community B, you better go to Community A and Community B."
Green also researched the correlation between commercial growth and crime. He used data on property tax values from the Oakland County Planning Department.
Green, a science, demographics and environment reporter with a background in statistics, said he is planning to follow up the series by seeing if the number of police officers is keeping up with community growth. Research last year showed the fire department increasingly understaffed.
Green advised reporters to look at the statistical significance of the data. Reporters are notorious for writing stories about startling numbers without looking at the whole statistical picture, he said. Small communities may experience a large percentage increase in crime but still have relatively low crime rates.
"A real pitfall in these type of stories is paying too much attention to the change and not to the actual numbers," Green said. "A lot of places with the fastest growing crime rates were also still the safest communities."
Jeff Green can be reached at (810) 745-4647, or send e-mail to user@cris.com.