Cities and metro murders 2011? (compare, crime, homicides, Atlanta)

[DtX4415]

San Jose - 09

In a murderous month in San Jose, Lowell Noble is perhaps the most surprising victim of all: The 82-year-old man died Jan. 7, authorities say, because of a savage beating that occurred almost 12 years ago.
His attacker has been locked up for years, but on Wednesday, after an unusual ruling by the coroner, San Jose police reopened the case as a homicide.
Noble was suffering from heart problems and diabetes when he died. While he needed a walker to get around, he enjoyed bridge and Reader's Digest in his final years.
However, despite his advanced age and health problems, the most significant factor in Noble's death was trauma to his head -- the traumatic brain injury he suffered on May 15, 1999, in a San Jose house, according to the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner.
More specifically, Noble suffered aspiration pneumonia because of dysphagia -- a swallowing problem. And that swallowing problem, the death certificate reads, was a direct result of his brain injury.

"Delayed fatals" happen regularly enough, but the gap between incident and death is usually much closer. In addition to Noble, San Jose had another one this year. Salvador Pena, a 56-year-old music and jewelry store owner in Alum Rock, was stabbed on Dec. 15 and died Jan. 8 as a result of those wounds.
San Jose police list Pena and Noble as 2011 homicide victims, bumping the number to nine -- a high figure in a city that had 20 homicides all of last year.

[AllTheWayToMemphis]

Four people died in four separate shootings in Philly today.

[rah]

San Francisco - 11

the latest three, which all happened last night:

Two slain at Fisherman's Wharf shop; merchant held (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/01/31/BA3R1HGLHK.DTL#ixzz1Cdg9G57j - broken link)

Potrero Hill street dispute ends in fatal shooting

[rah]

Originally Posted by jaraylee182004

Wow, that's really violent, they really wanted her dead. Crazy world out there.

yeah it can be crazy, though it turns out it that molotov cocktail incident didn't happen exactly as it was initially reported. The woman was actually strangled in Sacramento, and then the killer drove her body to SF, put her in the passenger seat of the car, and then he tossed the molotov inside. So that one gets counted towards Sacramento's murder total, not SF's.

Still bad/crazy, but not as horrible as death by fire, thankfully. Unfortunately a couple years ago that did happen here though...two women robbed a homeless woman in the Tenderloin, and the homeless women talked to the cops. The next day the women returned and kidnapped the homeless woman off of the street, brought her to an empty lot near candlestick Park, doused her in gasoline, and burned her alive.

[Nineties Flava]

Originally Posted by rah

yeah it can be crazy, though it turns out it that molotov cocktail incident didn't happen exactly as it was initially reported. The woman was actually strangled in Sacramento, and then the killer drove her body to SF, put her in the passenger seat of the car, and then he tossed the molotov inside. So that one gets counted towards Sacramento's murder total, not SF's.

Still bad/crazy, but not as horrible as death by fire, thankfully. Unfortunately a couple years ago that did happen here though...two women robbed a homeless woman in the Tenderloin, and the homeless women talked to the cops. The next day the women returned and kidnapped the homeless woman off of the street, brought her to an empty lot near candlestick Park, doused her in gasoline, and burned her alive.

Why do the sadist murders always happen in SF?

[MurphyKing54]

Seems like Frisco is having a bad year so far. At this rate they could end the year with over 120 murders.

Thank god Newburgh is still at 0, let's keep it that way!

[DtX4415]

Dallas - 10


2010 - 08, year total = 148
2009 - 14, year total = 166
2008 - 12, year total = 170
2007 - 16, year total = 200
2006 - 22, year total = 187
2005 - 14, year total = 202
2004 - 20, year total = 248
2003 - 11, year total = 226
2002 - 20, year total = 196
2001 - 16, year total = 240
2000 - 28, year total = 231


other violent crime is down too, but that can also be attributed to this

The Dallas Morning News reported in 2009 that the city deviates from the national guidelines in some reporting areas. In particular, Dallas police do not follow Uniform Crime Reporting guidelines when recording aggravated assaults and burglaries.

Dallas began counting aggravated assaults differently in 2007 as part of policy changes sold to the public as a way to make the city's crime-counting procedures more accurate.

Under the changed rules, only when assaults using weapons such as bottles, bricks, pipes and other objects actually cause serious injury are they classified as aggravated assaults when reported as part of the crime rate to the FBI. But FBI guidelines say that any time such an object is used in an assault, the incident should be classified as an aggravated assault, regardless of whether there is an injury.

After the change took effect, the department's aggravated assault tally dropped more than 30 percent in 2007. As part of the 2009 investigation, the newspaper examined a week's worth of assault reports and found that, had they been classified correctly according to FBI guidelines, the number of aggravated assaults would have been at least 50 percent higher that week.

City and police officials have defended the current way of reporting assaults, saying it better reflects how prosecutors would be likely to charge a person under the Texas penal code. But the FBI says reporting under UCR standards should be independent of prosecutorial decisions.

"That is, in a word, cheating, if they are basing it on whether a prosecutor will bring charges," said Mike Maltz, a senior researcher at the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University.

In 2010, the change in the number of aggravated assaults was slight - down 1.2 percent. "The aggravated assault changes have been baked into the figures, and so year-to-year changes won't show false reductions in crime," Brown said.

Simple vs. aggravated

A recent sampling of police records by The News found that the department continues to classify victims beaten with objects including a clothes iron, canes and bottles as "simple" assaults rather than aggravated assaults, as they should be under national guidelines. Those assaults effectively vanish from the city's violent-crime rate.

The Police Department has classified some attacks in which serious injuries occurred as "simple," too.

At Fair Park, a woman struck a man above the lip with her hand as she was holding a cellphone and wearing a large University of Oklahoma ring. The man suffered a gash that required five stitches to close, and a police report said he would possibly need "plastic surgery." But the incident was not recorded as an aggravated assault.

In another incident the same day, a man underwent surgery after suffering a broken jaw during a gang-related incident, but the attack was not classified as an aggravated assault.

Each year, Dallas police also classify hundreds of break-ins as vandalism, a lesser crime that is not factored into the overall crime rate reported to the FBI. As long as the intruders leave empty-handed, such incidents are often not labeled burglaries.

Dallas police do this even though federal guidelines instruct police to report such break-ins as burglaries unless the "investigation clearly established that the unlawful entry was for a purpose other than to commit a felony or theft."

Police officials have said that officers report burglaries only when there is solid evidence of what an intruder intended to do.

In 2009, a one-week sample of cases examined by The News estimated that the city's reported burglary rate that week was 10 percent lower because of the way the department was counting crime.

"That's a 30-year-old practice and so there's no benefit to the crime-reduction numbers" now, Brown said.

The practice continues. In July, intruders pried open the door to an empty building that once housed a Kroger's grocery store near Walnut Hill Lane and Central Expressway. A security guard spotted the open door and the intruders fled, leaving behind a bag of tools including crowbars and electric saws, said Dean Taylor, who oversees the property.

Taylor was surprised to learn that police didn't count the break-in as a burglary. The department recorded the incident as criminal mischief.

'It's ridiculous'

"It's ridiculous," Taylor said. "They had all the tools to tear the copper out with. They were there to steal the copper, I have no doubt."

Other major cities, including St. Louis, Philadelphia and Baltimore, previously have been caught underreporting crime. This week, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly appointed three former federal prosecutors to review his department's crime reporting system amid accusations that police officials have gamed the system to their benefit.

Staff writer Rudloph Bush contributed to this report.

------------------------
| 2 0 1 1 |
------------------------
AGG. |RAPE| ROBBERY
------------------------
JAN - 307 | 30 | 291
------------------------



------------------------
| 2 0 1 0 |
------------------------
AGG. |RAPE| ROBBERY
------------------------
JAN - 367 | 42 | 466
------------------------



------------------------
| 2 0 0 8 |
------------------------
AGG. |RAPE| ROBBERY
------------------------
JAN - 342 | 48 | 614
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------------------------
| 2 0 0 7 |
------------------------
AGG. |RAPE| ROBBERY
------------------------
JAN - 391 | 39 | 543
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------------------------
| 2 0 0 6 |
------------------------
AGG. |RAPE| ROBBERY
------------------------
JAN - 640 | 52 | 576
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------------------------
| 2 0 0 5 |
------------------------
AGG. |RAPE| ROBBERY
------------------------
JAN - 602 | 64 | 592
------------------------

[DtX4415]

Philadelphia - 34*

2010 - 21, year total = 306
2009 - 24, year total = 302
2008 - 24, year total = 331
2007 - 32, year total = 391


* Included in the above 2011 homicide victim statistics are the eight deaths resulting from the grand jury investigation, released on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, charging Dr. Kermit Gosnell with eight counts of murder. Although the homicides occurred in previous years, per the rules and regulations of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) guidelines, the victims are included in the homicide statistics for the year in which the homicides become known to the police.

[rah]

^ interesting about Dallas and the underreporting of crimes...San Francisco was doing something similar with its aggravated assaults, except that instead of omitting those with no injuries, they omitted every single one that was considered to be domestic violence. They admitted that they had been undercounting the assault rate by an average of 1,200 incidents every single year since at least 2005, but they were vague on exact numbers (and claimed that it was all just due to error...yeah years of constant non-stop errors...right). In 2008 for example, the SFPD reported just over 2,300 aggravated assaults to the FBI, but there were in fact over 3,800 aggravated assaults that year. The SFPD of course revealed this all as quietly as possible, in late 2009, and it was barely reported on...it was even completely ignored by the San Francisco Chronicle. To make things more frustrating, the SFPD still has not updated it's old statistics to the correct numbers, even though its been over a year since they admitted to underreporting the stats. So your average person who knows nothing about this is going to see lots of stats that are all wrong, and think that SF's assault rate and total violent crime rate are much lower than they truly are. And you know what's even more annoying? The SFPD seems to STILL BE DOING IT, even after they were caught and admitted it. I know this because the FBI has SF at just 2,372 aggravated assaults for 2009, and the preliminary 2010 FBI crime reports also have SF at just 1,200 assaults for the first 6 months of 2010...which suggests only 2,400 or so for that entire year as well. The stats for both years look suspect when you realize SF had been averaging well over 3,500 aggravated assaults per year, from 2005-2008 (with the correct stats). It's either that the SFPD is still lying/cheating with the stats, or SF just so happened to magically and drastically drop it's assault rate FOR REAL right after the SFPD was caught doing all of this crap...and that seems to be too much of a coincidence, especially considering the SFPD's bad track record with lies, cover-ups, misinformation, poor leadership, etc. Further more, if the under-counting was do to error, as the SFPD claims, then why are they presumably still making those "errors"?

here's the ONLY article i've ever found on it: San Francisco Police Department records distorted | Brent Begin | Local | San Francisco Examiner

so...some cities that have recently been caught underreporting crime to the FBI:

St. Louis
Philadelphia
Cleveland
Detroit
Baltimore
San Francisco

Any others out there that have been caught doing this (not suspected, but actually caught)?

[Alacran]

Chicago 29

The blizzard helped ease on homicides