With a Roar of Motorcycles, New Haven Cops Answer Wave of Shootings

Seven shootings. Forty-eight hours. Then the release of a statistically specious, but nevertheless disturbing, list claiming New Haven is now suddenly the country’s “fourth” most violent city. Two questions emerged: How meaningful are all those numbers? And, in either case, will a phalanx of fired-up police motorcycles provide some relief?

That mix of mind-numbing data and human bloodletting took place over the last 24 hours.

First city officials (minus the police chief, who’s out of town) announced their response to a renewed wave of gun violence around town amid the hovering specter of summer. At a press conference at the Whalley Avenue substation, police said they police plan to fire up their motorcycles and head out to crime “hot spots,” using routine traffic stops to ferret out more dangerous troublemakers.

Mayor John DeStefano, facing an electorate fed up with crime in an election year, struck a nuanced message: These periodic waves of shootings have happened before. They don’t necessarily mean a crisis, but they reflect an ongoing reality of too much violence that requires a stepped-up and proactive response.

Meanwhile, the FBI released its annual report detailing crime in American cities. Here, too, a mixed message was delivered. It showed that although New Haven reported less crime in 2010 than in 2009, it rose from 18th to fourth in an annual ranking of most dangerous cities.

Such rankings rely on so many weak variables that even the FBI doesn’t prepare them. It just releases the hard data. But instantly a site called 24/7wallstreet crunched the data and released a top-ten ranking of sizable cities. That led to instant local stories around the nation, and around the web, most not citing the website as the source. By Thursday morning the New Haven Register had a top-of-the-front-page headline declaring: “FBI: 4TH MOST DANGEROUS U.S. CITY.” The list showed New Haven climbing to number four with 15.4 violent crimes per 100,000 citizens.

Flint did worse. See the website’s ranking and breakdown here.

Read the FBI’s full report here and the city-by-city breakdown here.

It showed New Haven’s murders doubling, from 11 to 22, in 2010. But it showed reported violent crime incidents dropping from 2,195 to 1,978.

The stats come with caveats. The FBI notes that some “cities” are part of larger regions elsewhere in the country; in areas like Connecticut, lower-crime suburbs that would be part of city limits elsewhere are instead separate stand-alone legal entities not counted in the urban stats. (That same phenomenon led to New Haven being ranked the country’s seventh “poorest” city in 1980 based on U.S. Census numbers—prompting a similar debate over whether Connecticut’s small-town home-rule tradition made the numbers meaningless or whether such parsing glossed over a serious challenge the city was ducking.)

The FBI issued this warning along with the statistics: “Each year when Crime in the United States is published, some entities use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region. Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents. Valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the range of unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction.”

Also complicating any ranking based on FBI numbers: Much crime goes unreported.

New Haven didn’t even used to report its crime stats to the FBI, until then-Police Chief James Lewis completed a years-long effort to wipe out a backlog of data entry and improve the reporting process.

One explanation: New Haven didn’t have the staff to compile the stats in the past.

Another possible explanation: how news like the latest ranking looks.

As with yesterday’s press conference about the recent shootings, the DeStefano administration had to navigate a line between avoiding an overreaction to isolated data and avoiding downplaying the very real pain that high crime is causing in New Haven.

Asked if the FBI rankings are meaningful, mayoral spokesman Adam Joseph responded:

“Regardless of where we end up on the list, there is too much violence in New Haven and places like New Haven. We have to fix this problem. No family in any neighborhood should be frightened or forced to live in fear. It is the mayor’s job, the police department’s job and everyone’s job to do better.

“The New Haven Police Department focus will remain on: narcotics, both at the street level and longer-term investigations; getting guns off the street; creating a highly visible police presence by targeting hot spots areas and motor vehicle enforcement; engaging the population on individuals recently released from incarceration; and talking, talking, talking with the community.”

Clifton Graves, who’s mounting a campaign to challenge DeStefano in a Sept. 13 Democratic mayoral primary, said the FBI stats and the recent shootings “speak to the need for change from the top.”

“Those numbers are always subject to interpretation,” Graves acknowledged. “That being said, the FBI numbers coupled with the harsh realities that far too many of our citizens face on a daily basis add up to a major concern. A seventh-grader from the Hill is telling me, ‘Mr. Graves, I’m afraid to come out and play.’ It speaks to the need for change from the top.”

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