Our story about crime in parks along the Arizona-Mexico border started after a park ranger remarked to me, 'It's getting so dangerous out here that I won't even take my family camping anymore.' At first, my newspaper wanted to measure crime on public land in Arizona and the West, but we quickly ran into obstacles. One big problem: Five federal agencies dominate land ownership in the Southwest, and none kept their data the same way.
The reporting got complex, even for what seemed like simple questions. Working with BLM's public affairs and law enforcement staff, we finally limited the scope to properties in the National Resource Conservation System. Even then, there was so much public land that we ended up limiting the scope even further by focusing on the region west of the Rocky Mountains. We had to deal with five agencies, none of which kept its data in the same way.
The federal agencies did not record their crimes using the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) format. The USDA Forest Service, for example, has a new system for reporting crimes that uses a violation code that does not conform with UCR categories. It took days to figure this out by building an Excel spreadsheet for each of the 40 forests in the West. The National Park Service has a standard form that its parks are supposed to use, but we discovered that not all parks use the form.
Now that we had the data, we had to figure out how to measure it. The statistical part was simple; we would use a common benchmark, crimes per 10,000 visitors. We also chose to measure acres per law enforcement officer. After we compiled the data and sorted it in Excel, we faced a new problem: dissimilar data. The numbers looked the same, but they were not comparable. We used the combined list internally to show us where to focus the reporting.
Our database guided us to a story on how crime on the Arizona-Mexico border was drawing law enforcement officers of the agencies away from their assigned stations. As a result, crime was going unnoticed and unpunished on vast tracts of recreational land. The database wasn't perfect. But it was a great guide for us to write a story on a subject close to the hearts of our readers.