Violent crimes up, but crime rate dropped in Lincoln in '07

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BY LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star

Bucking a national trend, violent crime inched up in Lincoln in 2007, according to crime statistics released by the FBI last week.

Lincoln’s police chief says the numbers represent a reasonable snapshot of the city, but they don’t tell the whole story.

While the city did have the greatest number of aggravated assaults (assaults with intent to inflict bodily harm) it’s seen since 1995, Chief Tom Casady said the crime rate fell last year.

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Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady (LJS file)

First, numbers from the Uniform Crime Report.

Last year in Lincoln, compared with 2006, there were:

69 more violent crimes

44 more aggravated assaults

13 more forcible rapes

11 more robberies.

On the flip side, there were:

482 fewer property crimes

456 fewer larceny/thefts

18 fewer burglaries

Eight fewer motor vehicles stolen

Two fewer arsons.

What does it all mean?

Reports of violent crime were up in Lincoln, despite being down 1.4 percent nationally and 0.4 percent in cities with populations of 100,000 to 249,999.

Yet, the crime rate in Lincoln went down in 2007 — by one-half  of one percent.

In part, the rate drop was due to fewer theft reports. In the fall, Lincoln police changed how they respond to drive-offs at fuel stations, which led to fewer reports.

“Really, for 2007 there ought to be an asterisk,” Casady said.

One number did catch his attention, the chief said.

In 2007, 173 robberies were reported. If not for a spike in 2005, which had 225, 2007 would have been the highest year on record for the crimes.

“That’s the one trend of the bunch that has me concerned,” he said.

Casady said the bulk of the increase came in the form of street robberies, not businesses.

Otherwise, he said, not much stands out.

“As I always caution people, it is always best to look at UCR (Uniform Crime Report) crime at a distance, not year to year,” Casady said.

A graph of the city’s crime rate on his computer screen showed it’s been going down, more or less, since 1991.

Violent crime, although it inched up last year, has held pretty steady over the past 16 years.

Lincoln has grown about 15 percent in the past decade, by U.S. Census estimates, Casady said. Yet the number of property crimes and violent crimes reported to Lincoln police and tracked by the FBI has gone down 6.2 percent.

Uniform Crime Report data track murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, auto theft and arson.

Casady said the problem with the data is that they don’t look at all crimes. Because there are so many more thefts than rapes and robberies, thefts end up making a disproportionate impact on a city’s crime rate, he said.

“So a tiny change in larceny-thefts drives the entire stat.”

Casady advised against making judgments about how well a community is policed strictly based on the so-called Part I FBI crime data.

“Crime is only a small part of the overall police workload,” he said.

Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.