Violent crime in the District rose sharply in the first half of 2008 while the rest of the country saw a decrease during that same time, documents show.
Murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults increased 6.5 percent in the first six months of last year, according to an internal D.C. police report obtained this week by The Examiner. The department has not publicly released the statistics.
D.C. police Chief Cathy Lanier last month testified before the D.C. Council that violent crime went down 5 percent in all of 2008.
The apparent contradiction is because the District uses two different classifications, D.C. Code and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, said Polly Hanson, head of the D.C. police statistics services bureau. The D.C. Code figures touted last month by Lanier are used to track daily trends, deploy patrols and post statistics on the department’s Web site.
The Uniform Crime Reporting figures are used “merely to send to the FBI for the exercise of comparison with the rest of the nation,” Hanson said.
The systems classify certain crimes differently, she said. Under the D.C. Code, a punch is considered a simple assault; under the FBI’s definition it’s considered an aggravated assault, or a violent crime. The D.C. law considers pickpockets and purse snatches as robberies, but the FBI calls those a larceny, not a violent crime, Hanson said.
“It is kind of confusing, but you’re talking about two separate things because the definitions vary,” Hanson said. “Nobody’s not trying to present a total picture.”
Kris Baumann, chairman of the Fraternal Order of Police Labor Committee, said the department has been playing with the numbers for the past four years and it will eventually catch up to them.
“If we don’t how much crime is occurring, then we don’t know how to allocate those resources. This is an absolute embarrassment. Again,” Baumann said.
Nationwide, violent crime fell by 3.5 percent during the first six months of 2008, according to the FBI preliminary report released in January. The District’s data showing a 6.5 percent increase was not included in the FBI’s report because it takes months to reconcile the two databases, police said.
The District was the only police department of the nation’s 50 largest to fail to send its numbers to the FBI.
Staff Writer Bill Myers contributed to this report.
