A few days after the Columbine High School (Colo.) shooting last April, we asked our local school district for statistics about violence at individual schools around Albuquerque. At first, we were planning to turn around a simple daily, but the district's foot-dragging eventually prompted us to turn the story into a small project.
Officials first told us that the district had never tallied any of its crime and violence data by school. They said they didn't want to embarrass principals of the more crime-ridden schools. Instead, each year the district sends the state a general report listing the total number of assaults, gun violations, drug charges and incidents of vandalism. We were welcome to that, they said.
We imagined that in Albuquerque Public Schools, a district of 120 schools with 85,000 students, district-wide numbers probably told just a small part of the story. We asked the district for its database of criminal reports. (The district has its own police force that patrols the elementary schools and middle schools. City police monitor the high schools.) They wouldn't give it to us electronically and our state law seemed to support them on that.
Starting from paper
They did give us paper printouts of three years of data, which we were able to scan in. Using a fax server that's generally used to scan classified ads and death notices, we were able to quickly scan dozens of pages at one time. Luckily, the paper reports were very clean and a couple of Excel macros later, we had recreated their database.
We then went to the city police to get records of every criminal report filed at the city's 11 high schools for the same time period. We were the first to combine the two data sets – a total of 13,000 criminal reports over three years – to get a more complete picture of crime in city schools.
While district officials knew of most gun violations in the schools and correctly reported those to the state, they didn't have any record of most of the city police reports, for everything from aggravated assault to rape.
We found that the district's annual reports underestimated nearly every category, especially assaults and drug violations. We also found, to no surprise, that in a district with 11 high schools and about 30 middle schools, reports of crime and violence weren't spread evenly across the city. Some schools reported four or five times the number of incidents as others.
The superintendent acknowledged that principals and parents should have this information broken down by school site.
Afterthoughts
There were a number of things we probably should have done differently.
We didn't realize going in that the underreporting would be such a large part of the story. We should have gone back to the city and requested reports for the three years from the 79 elementary schools and 30 or so middle schools, but by that time we were well into the project and wanted to get it into the paper. Thus, we focused mostly on high schools.
Also, we probably should have fought longer on getting the data electronically, despite the poorly worded state law.
The stories appeared in the paper a month after we first asked for the violence statistics. About two weeks were wasted negotiating with the district about the data. Once we had created the database, we spent a few days using Access and Excel to analyze the data and another week reporting and writing the stories. We combined the crime data with other school data in our files, including drop-