Correction: CQ Press ranks the three-county Pine Bluff metropolitan area second-worst in its 2013 list of high-crime metro areas, with a crime rate 120 percent above the national average for metropolitan areas. This article incorrectly identified the ranking and crime-rate percentage.
Is the three-county Pine Bluff metropolitan area really the second-most dangerous in the United States, as British newspaper website The Independent claims?
Is the six-county Little Rock area the eighth-most dangerous?
It depends, say critics of an annual ranking of highcrime and low-crime cities and metropolitan areas that is based on FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data.
The FBI gathers and compiles crime data from law-enforcement agencies nationwide that participate voluntarily.
Washington-based CQ Press uses portions of the data about six major crimes - murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor-vehicle theft - each year to rank cities and metropolitan areas by the rate of those crimes per 100,000 residents, a common statistical method for leveling the disparity in population.
But CQ Press’ methodology has been widely criticized by law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
In an FBI news release issued after the most recent data was published in mid-January, the agency called such rankings “simplistic and/or incomplete.”
They “often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents,” thestatement said, adding that users of the data should use caution in comparing cities, metropolitan areas, states or universities based on the data.
Larry Salinger, a criminologist at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, cautioned that the public often doesn’t understand crime rates and that ranking cities by the rates can be deceptive.
“Crime rates could vary so much from year to year depending on how police count crimes, or there may have been an increase or decrease that is out of the norm that skews the rate,” Salinger said.
It’s risky for the public to form its judgment of a city from its ranking in the report, he said.
“If people based where they wanted to go on crime, there are a lot of places they wouldn’t go,” he said. “You really need to look at a lot of different things in terms of quality of life to decide whether the city is moredangerous than another.”
CQ Press’ listings include only cities with a population of 75,000 or more, and even if a city meets that requirement, such as Chicago, it is left out if it doesn’t report crimes consistent with the FBI’s program, according to the publisher.
Law-enforcement agencies submit data to the FBI voluntarily, but CQ Press - formerly associated with Congressional Quarterly Inc. but now owned by SAGE Publications - reported that more than 99 percent of the nation’s population was accounted for in the most recent report.
Pine Bluff’s metropolitan area- which includes Cleveland, Jefferson and Lincoln counties - actually ranks No.2 in CQ Press’ listings its crime rate is about 120 percent higher than the national average.
The Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn metropolitan area ranked first, followed by the Flint, Mich., and Memphis areas, which ranked higherthan Pine Bluff.
Despite criticism of how that score was calculated, Pine Bluff Police Chief Jeff Hubanks doesn’t deny the perception of danger associated with the area’s ranking.
“I have to say, we earned the distinction,” he said. “Pine Bluff had 18 homicides in the city limits in 2012. We’ve got a crime problem as well as an image problem and we are working on it as hard as we can.”
“I’m not going to boohoo about the numbers looking bad. Hell they do look bad. They are,” he said.
The Pine Bluff metropolitan area, a population of 101,017, reported 15 homicides in 2011. The Detroit metropolitan area, 4,293,012 people, reported 416 homicides.
Hubanks took the lead of the department in January and started what is called “problem-oriented policing,” meaning officers focus on crime that is causing the most disruption in the city. For Pine Bluff, that’s drug dealers, he said.
The average person isn’t in danger in the city, he said, but the “black males ages 17 to 25 who choose to sell drugs” are the ones at risk.
“I think you can take raw data like [the CQ Press rankings] and draw a conclusion,” he said. “We do it all the time.”
But critics and even CQ Press itself caution against deducing whether a city isdangerous based solely on the rankings.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors releases a statement annually describing its members’ frustration with the rankings.
“It’s troubling that the data continues to be misused to rank U.S. cities by crime rate, in defiance of the FBI’s warnings against the practice,” the group’s statement quotes Houston Mayor Annise Parker.
Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola talked Friday of the numerous variables that make comparison of cities difficult.
“The numbers get manipulated based on local procedures,” he said. “Say someone robs a store with six people inside, different cities would report that as one robbery or six. In Little Rock, we’d call that six robberies.”
Other than a slight increase last year, Little Rock’s number of violent crimes has been consistently decreasing over the past 30 years, he said.
“The people who are skeptical of these rankings are experts in the field, so I take what they say as much more reliable than some populated indication that is created by somebody somewhere,” he said.
Based solely on the six major crimes CQ Press compared, Little Rock had a crime rate of about 4,387 per 100,000 people - roughly 246 percent above the national average.
That ranked the city the 14th-highest in the nation.
Fort Smith was No. 115 on the list, with a crime rate about 64 percent higher than the nation’s.
The Little Rock metropolitan area - which includes Faulkner, Grant, Lonoke, Perry, Pulaski and Saline counties - ranked ninth-highest for crime in the nation.
Texarkana’s metropolitan area, which includes Arkansas’ Miller County and Texas’ Bowie County, ranked 15. The Hot Springs metropolitan area of Garland County came in 24th and the Jonesboro metropolitan area of Craighead and Poinsett counties was at 114.
CQ Press posts a disclaimer on its website, cqpress. com, that says it is “difficult to compare statistics across agencies” and concedes that “there are well-documented criticisms” of its methodology.
“We hope that the report will bring attention to different issues out there,” the publisher’s spokesman Camille Gamboa said. “We try to be very clear with what the methodology is, so everybody knows this is how we came up with the rankings.”
She noted that the publication has ceased to title the rankings as “most dangerous” or “least dangerous” cities.
“These terms are no longer used because perceptions of safety and danger are just that - perceptions,” a purpose statement says.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 19 on 02/24/2013