Feds now seize more assets than burglars

Take a moment to let the meaning of this chart from the Washington Post (11/23) sink in:

The federal government now seizes more assets from its citizens than burglars steal every year in aggregate. And that doesn't even include seizures under state law. In most cases, the government takes the assets without the owner ever having been convicted of a crime. WaPo's underlying analysis came from this economist who calculated:

Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.

See a related column from the Institute for Justice's Matt Miller providing a Texas perspective.

Failure to hire sufficient, competent lab staff hindering Austin burglary clearance rates

For many years, every budget cycle the Austin Police Department has proposed sizable expansions of the number of patrol officers while failing to boost civilian crime-scene techs and lab capacity to solve the crimes - particularly home burglaries - that rank highest on the public's complaint list. Reported the Austin Statesman (Dec. 24):

Austin police solve fewer than 10 percent of the city’s residential burglaries, a little less than the national average of 12.7 percent, according to the federal government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The low number of cases “cleared” — by indicting suspects or recovering stolen property — has persisted despite 20 years of declining crime rates. Police departments across the country face backlogs of unprocessed evidence because of personnel shortages. As evidence rooms fill up, the time needed to analyze fingerprints and DNA keeps growing.

For the Austin Police Department, solving burglary cases comes down to manpower: It’s lab technicians, not detectives, who are in high demand.

Three-quarters of Austin’s more than 6,300 burglaries last year were of residences, according to police data. The department has a backlog of 1,500 fingerprints, said latent print supervisor Officer Dennis Degler.

“For the past few years, we’ve done with four examiners when we should have had six examiners,” Degler said. “We haven’t been granted any new positions, and we haven’t had any new positions in the past decade.”

Two employees were laid off because of a decision to pursue stricter standards and accreditation from an international organization, Degler said.

“We’re trying to get away from the stigma that our people were not competency-tested, that we didn’t have good quality control,” Degler said. “When you’re talking about depriving someone of their freedom through forensic evidence, credibility’s important.”

The 25 employees of the department’s recently established Burglary Unit have continued to collect more evidence than the examiners can efficiently process.

The low clearance rate cited for burglaries investigated by APD is actually higher than they've reported in the past. Still, think of it: The lack of two examiners undermining the work of two dozen officers in the burglary unit and generating hundreds of backlogged cases. Regardless, for years APD administrators emphasized patrol officers over crime lab staffing in their annual budget requests. For want of a nail,  the shoe was lost ...

It's also remarkable that, for some undefined period, APD apparently employed two people in its crime lab who were not competency tested and who fostered a perception that they "didn't have good quality control." Well then, when and why were those folks hired in the first place? How many cases did they work on? What problems triggered their dismissals? And why weren't they replaced with actually competent staff instead of letting backlogs pile up to unacceptable levels? In a lot of ways, the story raises more questions than it answers.

The Statesman story is right that crime lab backlogs are growing seemingly everywhere, overwhelmed by unprecedented demand. Even where funding has increased substantially, as at state crime labs, it still hasn't kept up with growth. Offhand, I can't think of a law enforcement agency in Texas that wouldn't benefit more from expanding forensic capacity than adding patrol officers.

Austin's new 10-1 council would do well to stop hiring ever-more patrol officers, at least for a budget cycle or two, to focus on bolstering crime labs, the 911 call center, and other civilian components of the police agency which the old council ignored in favor of paying for ever-more uniformed officers. If the city wants more police coverage, there are ways to do that without a budget increase.

Coverup in Amarillo? Cops' burglary/search oddly unprosecuted

What a bizarre story! A former Amarillo PD officer was indicted last week on evidence tampering charges. Here's the nut: Officer Saulo Bravo and his partner, who has not been publicly named, without telling their supervisor, much less securing a warrant, drove an unmarked car to a presumed suspect's home at 2:30 in the morning on Aug. 24 and, out of uniform, broke in like a couple of two-bit second-story men and began searching. The homeowner awoke and heard them but they only announced themselves as police officers when he began shooting at them with a pistol.

Later that day, Bravo "allegedly concealed an affidavit that was to be used as evidence in a pending investigation" and also "allegedly destroyed a supplement to a police report and changed the report," reported the Globe-News. So the indictment is over covering up records related to the burglary, not the burglary itself.

Inexplicably, reported the paper, "Police have not said whether Bravo’s partner was disciplined over the incident." However, since under the civil service code there'd be a public record if he'd received discipline that involved a suspension, we know that means any discipline did not rise to the level of losing pay over it. Certainly the partner isn't being prosecuted for the B&E; nor is Bravo, for that matter. As is so often the case in public life, it's not the bad act but the coverup that triggers a response.

Read the Globe-News account. Let me know in the comments whether you think of this as a Fourth Amendment violation, primarily a records-tampering issue, or is this mainly a burglary/crime?

If Amarillo PD won't even name both officers involved and nobody is being prosecuted for the actual break-in, this becomes a matter the department can't be trusted to handle internally.  Maybe it's time for the Texas Rangers or the Justice Department to step in to determine whether Bravo and his partner should be prosecuted for more than just the paper-work faux pas listed in the indictment. It's not just that Bravo tampered with evidence to cover up what he'd done, it's what he'd done! And got caught! If anyone but cops broke into your home and got caught red-handed, they'd catch a burglary charge. Bravo's partner didn't even get a one-day suspension.

As an aside, this has implications for the Michael Morton Act. Let's say Bravo's partner is still working as a police officer generating evidence for prosecutors to use in criminal cases. Will prosecutors reveal his role in the burglary to defense counsel as impeachment evidence? If he's anonymous so far, that implies they don't intend to make that information public. Such diffidence toward misconduct could be more easily swept under the rug before the Michael Morton Act, which raises questions about secret personnel files in civil service cities that haven't been widely considered.

Grits' prediction: They plead Bravo's case down to a Class A misdemeanor charge, he gets probation and loses his badge. Also, the bit about the partner not receiving public discipline stinks to high heaven. If this case doesn't draw down outside oversight, the takeaway can only be that effectively there isn't any. The DA should seek recusal and ask for a special prosecutor and get these cases out of the hands of local politicos.

Austin PD wants 20% budget hike to fight less crime, respond to fewer calls

The Austin Police Department wants an astonishing 19.5% budget increase in the coming year to hire more officers, reported the Austin Statesman (Aug. 13), even though, as Council Member Bill Spelman questioned "why the city needs more police officer if crime rates, traffic fatalities and calls for service are down compared with last year," which for the record is a very good question. Chief Art Acevedo said the new officers would go to combat property crime. Because, I guess, that's a new thing.

Grits agrees the department has long needed to improve its focus on property crime, But there are smarter, more creative ways to do that than a 20 percent department-wide budget hike. Why not turn away from failed methods of combating property crime while freeing up officers for more productive crime fighting tasks? Where are the fiscal conservatives when you need them?

How Houston can boost police coverage without busting the budget

Say you're chief of the fourth largest police department in the country. You need more warm bodies to investigate crimes but the city's revenue cap means you can't afford to hire more officers. Why not use the ones you've got more intelligently?

A consultant's report (pdf) released last month found that Houston PD failed to investigate 20,000 offenses for which officers had "workable leads." Reported the Houston Chronicle, "The report noted that 15,000 burglaries and thefts, 3,000 assaults and nearly 3,000 hit-and-runs were not investigated last year. The data was based on monthly HPD management reports of cases with workable leads." From the Chron, see:

• 20,000 criminal cases not investigated in 2013 by HPD
• Chief: HPD can't investigate every crime and should not try
• Editorial: HPD needs help: More money won't cure ineffective management at the top
• Falkenberg: HPD woes are for us all to bear

I meant to post these links before now except Grits suffers from the same nagging feeling as Charles Kuffner that "We need more context to the HPD no-investigations issue." Many cases go uninvestigated for a variety of reasons, so is 20,000 typical, high, low? The low clearance rates on burglaries don't surprise me; we have the same issues in Austin. Reported crime has declined in recent years in Houston, so something's working in a positive direction. But whether that's because of police practices, demographic changes, economic improvement, declining background levels of lead, the rise of video games and cable TV, who knows? What's responsible remains largely a mystery.

In Houston, the announcement has predictably led to calls for H-Town to hire more police officers, so let's focus on that. Assume for a moment more officers are needed (and I agree with Kuff that how many is a legitimate debate). The city is strapped so how to pay for it?

Here's how to boost the number of police officers available on patrol while freeing up officers to work as detectives in the burglary and other backlogged divisions:

• Implement verified response for burglar alarm calls, requiring alarm companies to verify a crime was committed before dispatching police. These alarms are 98-99% false, almost never result in arrests, and account for 10-12% of most departments' patrol calls. This one reform would be the equivalent of increasing patrol staffing by ten percent.
• Begin to use discretion given police by the Legislature in 2007 to write citations instead of making arrests for driving with a suspended license and possession of marijuana.
• Follow Texas' other large cities by issuing paraphernalia citations for crack pipes instead of sending them to the crime lab to scrape traces off for state-jail felony possession prosecution. (See Harris County District Judge Mike McSpadden's letter to the Legislature urging this reform.)

Those three changes would free up many thousands of police hours without costing the city a dime - certainly enough to allow HPD to adjust staffing levels to create a few dozen new detective slots. Indeed, the last couple of bulleted items would probably save the county money, too.

Using DNA in nonviolent offenses would swamp crime labs

In the future, as the national CODIS database expands to include, conceivably, every US arrestee, DNA will be used to solve all sorts of common crimes, not just violent offenses. It can be used for nonviolent crimes now, in fact, but the main barrier to doing so is a lack of resources at crime labs. In Northwestern Louisiana, federal grants are being used to process DNA in burglaries in a pilot program, reports the Shreveport Times.

The effort to clear a backlog of burglary cases started in March. The crime lab was staffed with eight new full-time DNA analysts and the will to go after a stack of property crimes cases, crime lab Director Jimmy Barnhill said.


The crime lab has tested DNA from 76 cases this year — 70 burglaries, five sexual assaults and one classified as "other."

Of those 76 cases, 78.5 percent came back with DNA matching someone in the Combined DNA Index System maintained by the state, crime lab forensic DNA analyst Jessica Esparza said.

Burglaries had an 84 percent hit rate against CDIS, meaning 84 percent of the time an unknown burglary suspect will be named by the system, Esparza said. She said 59 percent of the total 2011 hits came from the Shreveport Police Department and 6 percent came from the Bossier City Police Department.

As new techniques come online like "touch DNA" that let investigators discover biological evidence in settings heretofore considered clean, the possible forensic uses for such technology will continue to grow faster than will the number of techs employed by the state to process the evidence, and much faster than city and county budgets to pay for local or private processing. There are opportunities for privatization here, but private labs doing this work also face greater responsibility to back it up in the courts than ever before when their work is used later on.

Either way, ramping up lab volumes while doing the work the right way, in a manner that will survive appellate and regulatory scrutiny, is one of the major challenges facing modern crime labs. They could begin processing DNA in more burglary cases, but as it stands, doing so requires a tradeoff with, say, reducing rape-kit backlogs. Short of some special, federally funded pilot program like in Shreveport, I doubt most law enforcement agencies would choose of their own accord to prioritize DNA testing resources on nonviolent offenses while untested rape kits linger on their storage shelves.

The 82nd Texas Legislature passed a bill this year that will require the creation of statewide rules at DPS governing collection and preservation of biological evidence. That's pretty much where the rubber meets the road on whether local labs and evidence handlers can competently manage the ever-growing volume of biological evidence coming their way. If it needn't be properly stored, cataloged, etc., they can probably go along to get along. If the evidence must be managed using high professional standards, the cost of expanding DNA testing to new domains may be, as a general rule, too prohibitive. At a minimum that tension will be explored more thoroughly as those rules are developed, both at DPS and perhaps on this blog.

RELATED: From Forbes, "Is DNA testing of dog poop forensic science gone too far?"

See related Grits posts: 

• Senate bills encourage retention, testing of old DNA evidence
• DNA could solve burlgaries if crime labs were bigger, better, more trustworthy 
• 'The DNA's over there, right next to the jelly: The problems with the preservation of evidence in Texas'
• Backlog of DNA cases complicates Houston crime lab's bias problems
• Large backlogs for DPS forensics testing
• Unanalyzed evidence held by law enforcement agencies
• Test possible innocence cases among Bexar DNA cache
• The coming fight over independent crime labs

Austin will raise taxes to hire more cops, but still won't investigate more burglaries

Should the City of Austin hire 47 new police officers it can't afford when it's short $10 million and nearly 12% of police calls respond to false alarms? Among the Austin City Council and the local media, nobody seems to question such assumptions. But they don't make sense to me.

Austin spends 2/3 of its city budget on public safety (police/fire/EMS), mostly the police department, and in the last decade public safety spending, led by super-generous raises for Austin police, soaked up virtually all additional revenue generated by economic growth. Here's the breakout for how the city general fund is being spent in FY 2011:

For several years now, obligations for pay raises at the Austin Police Department have been a huge driver for local tax increases, to the point where now every city budget plan begins, as the 2012 budget does, assuming that the city will raise its tax rate the maximum allowable amount short of triggering a possible rollback. State troopers would need a 52% pay hike to match Austin PD, who are far and away the highest paid officers in the state and, when adjusted for the regional cost of living, arguably are the highest paid in the nation.

At times, I'm not sure what the high pay is buying us. The 2010 annual performance report (pdf) from the city manager for the Austin Police Department in places reads like something out of a bureaucratic fantasyland. See in particular the "key measures" listed on p. 63 of the pdf, in which we see that both violent and property crime rates per 1,000 residents have increased in the last half-decade, running counter to state and national trends. The final column asks "Goal met?," and for both performance measures the city placed a shiny green check mark. Ditto after data showed a 14% rise in per-capita DWI fatalities last year. APD had inexplicably predicted an even larger increase, despite declining DWI death trends nationally. This is a head-scratcher. If rising per capita crime rates are really APD's goal, maybe they're aiming is too low!

Compounding Grits' frustration with out-sized local police expenditures and below-average outcomes, when the Austin city manager compiled his list of "unmet needs" for the 2012 budget, it included 44 FTEs (full-time equivalent job positions) at the police department, including 18 new 911 call takers, in addition to 47 new officer positions already planned for FY 2012. The city manager says APD needs more resources to reduce clearance rates for serious crimes, particularly burglaries, which are notoriously declining:

APD requests that 8 of the 47 new officer positions for FY 2012 be upgraded to detective to improve caseloads and increase the number of cases solved. The percent of serious Part I Index crimes (homicide, robbery, burglary) that were solved decreased in recent years. The FY 2010 clearance rate was 8% lower than FY 2009 and 10% lower than the average of the last four years (FY 2006 through FY 2009). Austin's clearance rate for Part I crimes in FY 2009 was 13.2% compared to the 18.3% national average.

So the 47 new officer slots don't even implicate efforts to increase burglary clearance rates - presumably most will be patrol-level positions. The department's plan is to fill those 47 slots but to leave extra resources for burglary investigation in the "unmet needs" category. Indeed, a recurring theme throughout city budget documents is that APD needs endessly more staff than it currently has to do its job and any failures or shortcomings may be attributed to lack of more personnel: "Without sufficient staffing levels," says the city in a document titled "Horizon Issues" (large pdf), "crime problems are identified, but very little can be done other than to respond to the problem after it has occurred."

These complaints about unmet staffing needs while expanding the police force strike Grits as odd, since elsewhere cities and counties are cutting their numbers of officers as a result of the budget crunch. Just like the federal government attempts to cut its budget after excluding the military and healthcare - the things it spends the most on - the City of Austin limits its budget frugality to the third of the budget devoted to non-public safety spending, like parks, libraries and health clinics. The police budget is a sacred cow.

Especially in tight budget times, I don't support APD adding 47 new officers until I'm convinced they're not wasting the efforts of those they employ now. Grits has frequently argued the easiest way to free up more officer time would be to implement verified response for burglar alarms. After Grits a couple of weeks ago quoted materials from the Dallas PD calling false burglar alarms "the single greatest waste of law enforcement resources" in America," I was sent the internal document below created by a now-retired APD lieutenant in 2007 promoting the idea for Austin. I'm told it was written for discussion within the department but was never submitted to the city council.

According to that document, "In 2006 the Austin Police Department responded to 42,906 alarm calls.  At least 39,354 of those alarms were burglary alarms.  These calls accounted for 11.7% of calls dispatched to Austin police officers and 5.4% of all incoming calls to the Austin-Travis County 9-1-1 center in 2006.  Approximately 99% of those alarms were false alarms." Out of those nearly 40,000 burglar alarm calls in 2006, Austin officers made a whopping 11 arrests for burglary as a result of alarms, with 7,467 actual burglaries reported that year. Meanwhile, APD clearance rates for burglary (i.e., the proportion solved) trail the national average and have been steadily declining, with more resources focused on reacting to false alarms than investigating the actual crimes. Nobody but the writers of alarm company brochures thinks responding to burglar alarm calls will help solve more burglaries, but APD's proposed 2012 budget hires new patrol officers for that task while leaving as an "unmet need" resources to actually investigate burglaries. How messed up is that?

The cost spent responding to alarms in Austin is half again the revenue generated from fines and fees, according to the report, but on top of that there's the opportunity cost: Officers employed to chase down false burglar alarms aren't available to investigate actual burglaries or other crimes. Switching to verified response would be the equivalent of reducing dispatched calls to police by around 10% or so. With that option available, I don't see the wisdom in hiring 47 new officers just to waste their time tracking down false alarms.

Here's the internal report from APD on verified response from 2007; other than the dated statistics, nothing's changed. The department faces the identical practical and political issues today. And the best, short-term solution is the same as that identified by Lt. Pendergrass in this document: Expanding police coverage not through higher taxes and hiring more officers, but diverting police responses from non-productive false alarms to investigating actual crimes. Just hiring more officers to waste their time on unproductive tasks make little public-safety sense.

False alarms are the "single greatest waste of law enforcement resources" in America, but political third rail

Dallas mayoral candidate and former Dallas police chief David Kunkle told the Dallas Observer that "verified response" for private burglar alarms is "good public policy and bad politics." He won't support the idea, not because he doesn't think it's a good one, but because he fears a tuff-on-crime backlash during a contested mayoral campaign. While Kunkle was police chief, Dallas briefly implemented verified response for business burglar alarms. As Merten wrote at the time, "The number of false alarms is staggering -- 97 percent -- and Kunkle compared it to having a car that would only start three times out of 100 and on those three times, it would take so long that you’d miss your appointments." That's about right: It's why Grits has repeatedly argued for sending the clunker to the junk heap.

Dallas originally considered verified response for residential alarms as well, which is where the really big savings would come. But alarm companies rallied their customers to preserve the subsidy, and ultimately those companies and their customers convinced the City Council to reverse course on commercial alarms as well. Merten notes that the Dallas City Council repealed the program one week after Chief Kunkle gave them a presentation urging its continuation, and I was able to locate that briefing (pdf) online. Here are some of the data the Chief used at the time to argue for the program:

• In 2004 the Police Department received almost 62,000 burglar alarms
• Of these, 97.2% or about 60,100 were false
• Responding to these alarms required the time of approximately 45 Dallas Police officers
• This false alarm rate was consistent with findings across the nation
• In Dallas, 86% of the citizens and businesses without alarms are subsidizing alarm responses for 14% who have alarms
• False alarm dispatches are the single greatest waste of law enforcement resources in the U.S.
• 2004 police response time for priority 3 calls was about 32 minutes

In the first year after implementation, business burglaries in Dallas declined by about .6%, according to Kunkle's briefing, meaning in aggregate the effect on business burglaries was a wash. However, DPD responded to 25,949 fewer alarms, or a 45% decrease, freeing up the equivalent of 24 full-time officers to focus on actual crimes. Given that result, with so many departments cutting officers, you'd think these days more cities would be leaping to implement verified response to maintain levels of police coverage with fewer cops on patrol.

But as Kunkle says, this is an instance where tuff-on-crime politics interferes with good public policy and common sense. The small minority being subsidized by police responses to alarms are extremely vocal and well-organized by alarm companies, who have lists with contact info of concerned customers that would be the envy of any political consultant. Plus, those with alarms almost by definition are relatively wealthier - after all, they got an alarm because they have stuff to steal - and therefore also more politically influential. By contrast, the 86% of Dallasites without burglar alarms who're footing most of the bill are unorganized, unaware of the subsidy, and may not even perceive they have a dog in the fight.

That calculus may and should change in an era of budget cuts and law-enforcement layoffs. Verified response would allow agencies to reduce their number of officers without reducing meaningful police coverage. And all the sky-is-falling rhetoric never seems to pan out as predicted in cities where verified response is implemented. I hear many, many politicians talk about cutting "waste" in government, so why are so many too cowardly to confront the "single greatest waste of law enforcement resources in the U.S."?

Austin police clearance rates for burglary plummeting

Clearance rates by the Austin Police Department for burglaries have radically declined in recent years - from 9% in 2000 to 5% in 2009 - and remain far below the national average clearance rate for burglaries of 13%, according to materials (pdf) presented last month to the Austin Public Safety Commission.

Perhaps as a consequence, the burglary rate in Austin per 100,000 residents increased over the same period from 1,048 to 1,138, making it among the most commonly reported crimes in the capital. The biggest increase came in residential burglaries, where taking a serial offender out of circulation has a disproportionate benefit to victims. A survey of Austinites included in the materials found that "Burglary of a residence is perceived as the 'most critical' problem by a large majority (55%), with all other categories of crime trailing far behind." Asked to identify the most critical public safety issue in their neighborhood, Austinites said:

• Burglary of a residence: 54.6%
• Burglary of a vehicle: 13.4%
• Violent Random Crime: 3.3%
• Violent Domestic Crime: 1.3%
• Drug Related Activity: 7.7%
• Traffic Issues: 6.9%
• Neighborhood blight: 3.3%
• Graffiti: Less than 1%

Increasing penalties for burglary - either of a residence or vehicles - helps little when clearance rates are so low. The relative certainty of punishment is more important for preventing crime than its intensity. If only one in 20 burglaries are solved, compared to more than one in eight nationally, harsher punishments won't help much. These are problems caused in the big picture by misplaced policing priorities, spreading law-enforcement resources too thin by trying to use it to solve every new social problem while failing to adequately investigate traditional, bread-and-butter crimes.

Another staff power point (pdf) says that APD's 14 property crime technicians "Respond to 35-45% of burglary crime scenes (limited due to availability of personnel)." So most burglaries they don't even pretend to seriously investigate, but they've got officers available to sit around in school zones to write tickets for texting. What's needed here isn't harsher punishments or more "enhancements" available to prosecutors; APD just needs to shift scarce resources to solving crimes that most matter to the public.

Dallas nixes verified response for commercial burglar alarms

The Dallas City Council earlier this month last year foolishly rejected Police Chief David Kunkle's highly successful initiative to require verification for commercial burglar alarms before sending police to respond. Mayor Tom Leppert pushed the council to vote 10-4 to overturn the nearly two-year old policy, despite the fact that it saved the department money, reduced fines on local businesses and enabled DPD to improve other services, all while burglaries declined.

More than 97% of commercial alarms in Dallas turn out to be false and of those that are real police almost never arrive in time to catch anyone in the act. For home alarms that figure is even higher.

Burglar alarm services sold by private companies are a classic example of "security theater." They make people feel safer but don't make it any less likely your home will be burglarized or that police will catch the person who robbed you.

What's more, the business model schlepps actual costs of providing the service onto taxpayers who pay for the cops who show up and mill around after each alarm goes off. The security company does nothing for their income but install the alarm system and call 911 when it's activated.

Bottom line: 911 is for emergencies and burglar alarms almost never qualify as such, but in many jurisdictions they're the single most common type of police service call.

According to the Dallas News ("Dallas police to respond to business burglar alarms," Sept. 7):

Wednesday's vote comes 21 months after the council voted 8-5 to institute verified response for businesses, with Mayor Laura Miller arguing: "I believe in the chief. This makes sense."

With the repeal, Mr. Leppert, who took office in June, scored his first major political victory on a contentious item before the council.

As recently as last week, Mayor Pro Tem Elba Garcia said she believed she had enough votes to reaffirm verified response, which Mr. Leppert placed on the council's agenda for a vote.

But Mr. Leppert persuaded council colleagues who remained undecided earlier this month to ultimately repeal the policy.

The policy shift also is redemption for a local alarm industry that's relentlessly lobbied council members since verified response became law in Dallas.

Dr. Garcia decried Wednesday's decision, saying it hurls Dallas back to the situation it found itself in earlier this decade, when hundreds of police officer work hours were wasted responding to false burglar alarms.

"Today's choice is whether we back up our chief of police and the Dallas Police Department and continue to prepare to protect citizens from harm, or we cave in to the alarm industry," Dr. Garcia said.

"It's about the utilization of a scarce resource," District 5 council member Vonciel Jones Hill said. "Verified response has worked the way it was intended to work. It does not make sense to continue to send a scarce resource to false alarms when we have higher priorities."

District 14 council member Angela Hunt said: "Our police chief helped us use our scarce resources ... to their highest and best use. Why are we taking them off the street? Why are we taking them out of our neighborhoods to cater to false alarms? We should listen to [Chief Kunkle's] guidance and not be swayed by politics."

Between February 2006 and March 2007, Dallas experienced a 45 percent reduction in burglar alarm calls and redirected $1.56 million in manpower costs previously spent on responding to false alarms to other work, according to the city staff's briefing to the council. It also noted that fees charged for false alarms decreased by $1.19 million.

Business burglaries declined by 0.6 percent during a one-year period that ended Feb. 28, according to the presentation to the council.

Dr. Garcia offered a substitute motion to shelve Wednesday's vote and direct the council's newly constituted Public Safety Committee, of which she is chairwoman, to further study verified response.

But her motion failed, and Mr. Leppert called for a vote on the original motion.

The council's decision is effective Oct. 1.

The Dallas City Council should be going the other direction, requiring verified response for home alarms as well. Instead their decision will reduce police coverage and increase response time for more serious calls. I'm sure the Dallas Council isn't planning to hire more officers to make up the difference.

Mayor Tom Leppert said, "We've got to be concerned about the policy and the wider message it sends." But what message is that, exactly? To me it's basically, "We'd rather make the general public less safe in order to subsidize private alarm companies who profit from selling fear instead of using police resources for fighting crime."

Is that really the message they want to be sending?

CORRECTION: The original post mistakenly said this change was made earlier this month. In fact, Dallas' verfied response ended one year ago and the Dallas News blog post I was reacting to was reporting, instead, on a new proposal by Dallas to ask the Legislature to give cities authority to fine people after the first false alarm. Sorry about the mixup.

UPDATE: A reader sent me data on Salt Lake City's verified alarm system, which appears to work great and save the city a lot of money. According to a handout from the Salt Lake PD I received via email:

The Verified Response ordinance became effective on December 1, 2000. Our department immediately experienced an unprecedented 90% reduction in alarm responses. Past efforts to reduce the volume of false alarms through permits, warnings, fines and suspensions had only a modest effect. Police response to alarms was most effective and efficient when it was first verified that alarm activation was indicative of suspicious activity. Private security guards are ideally suited to make this initial verification. Police continue to respond to human-activated alarms such as robbery, panic and duress which continue to be 99% false.

In the first year, Verified Response freed 8,482 officer hours which could then be redirected to other police priorities and also saved $508,920 in associated personnel costs. ...

Verified Response has been a win-win for our citizens and our department. Due to the low priority of alarm signals, private guard response time to alarm activations has been much quicker than police response. Police have been able to reduce the response time to high priority emergency calls, including panic, robbery and duress alarms, by nearly one minute. Most citizens will pay as little as an additional $5 per month on their monitoring account for guard response, rather than the former $100 false alarm fines. Most importantly, our officers were able to redirect time spent on answering false alarm signals to other public safety concerns.

Chronicle oversells rise in burglaries from Uniform Crime Reports

When the latest Uniform Crime Statistics came out, I mentioned that because of the poor quality of the data and the lack of contextual information, one should be wary of promoting misinterpretations of the data by singling out one area that increased and claiming it represents a crime problem. That's the approach taken in an article in the Houston Chronicle today ("Burglary increase puzzles experts," June 22):

The burglary was among more than 29,000 reported in Houston in 2007 — an 8 percent increase from the year before, based on preliminary Uniform Crime Report numbers recently released. Burglaries also went up in other major Texas cities — by 14 percent in San Antonio, 8 percent in Austin and 4 percent in Dallas.

Though such crimes rarely make the news or draw the public outrage that accompanies homicides and carjackings, they have the potential to become just as dangerous. That was evident last week when a 74-year-old ranch owner, Floyd Nauls Sr., was seriously wounded by gunfire after surprising two intruders inside his northeast Houston home.

Burglars can also destroy a sense of security not only in the homes they target, but also in neighborhoods, said Dr. Bob Walsh, retired criminal justice professor and former associate dean at the University of Houston-Downtown.

Victims "just have a sense of vulnerability that comes over them," said Walsh, a former burglary detective. "That feeling is communicated with other people, and it becomes magnified."

Experts say they don't know why Houston's annual burglary numbers jumped up, even as the city's homicides, rapes and car thefts declined.

Population growth is not entirely to blame. Even when factoring in the surge of new residents, Houston's annual burglary rate still increased from 1,296 to 1,339 per 100,000 residents, amounting to an increase of slightly more than 3 percent.

I view these data as the equivalent of a ruler with an error rate of plus or minus 12 inches. Too many unknown variables make this data impossible to interpret as concretely as the Chronicle story attempts to do with it. E.g., did the number of burglaries go up, or for some reason were a greater percentage reported? Reporting rates for property crimes are so low a slight increase can make a big increase in the numbers.

Thankfully some of the experts quoted in the Chronicle played down the numbers and added some context to their interpretation:

The rise in burglaries does not mean a crime wave is coming, experts say.

"As a scholar of policing, I would not be at all concerned that this represents some kind of a serious jump in crime," said Dr. Larry Hoover, a professor at Sam Houston State University's College of Criminal Justice, who studies crime rates and trends. "You have to look at the other property crime in conjunction with it — larceny stayed even, and motor vehicle theft went down."

While crime uniformly went up across the country in the 1980s and dropped in almost all major cities from 1991 to 2004, the last three years produced uneven patterns with some areas showing unexplained increases and declines in certain types of crime — changes that Hoover describes as "baffling."

The Uniform Crime Reports occasionally will reveal variations in some crime rates of 5 percent to 8 percent for which no obvious reasons can be pinpointed, he said.

"Alarmists see this as a precursor to a new surge in crime," Hoover said. "Others see it as random variation — that we've driven crime to historical lows, and you're going to see spots of increase."

To Dr. Brian Lawton, another professor at Sam Houston State University's College of Criminal Justice, Houston's burglary statistics are not that remarkable.

Even so, the story was accompanied with a list of tips to keep their homes safe from burglars, which might have some pub ed use, I suppose, but flies in the face of the experts quoted in the article saying there's no cause for alarm. Indeed, to some extent the numbers showing increased crime may be due to extra Houston PD resources expended to address the topic:

HPD has tried to halt the rise in burglaries by educating the public, such as placing fliers on cars or homes where obvious security lapses are noticed, and assigning officers to concentrate in particularly troubled areas of northeast, west and southwest Houston instead of responding to calls on the radio.

The department's newly created Crime Reduction Unit, which has made nearly 3,000 felony arrests since its inception six months ago, has moved into places with the worst burglary trends, Mayor Bill White said.

HPD also has begun distributing 3,000 fingerprint kits to officers and cameras to supervisors so they can gather more evidence at burglaries instead of waiting for hours on a fingerprint technician to arrive, said HPD Executive Assistant Police Chief Charles McClelland.

"If we can take away the target, reduce the opportunity or apprehend the suspect," McClelland said, "we're going to reduce the crime."

For all these reasons it's a risky business to take Uniform Crime Reports and focus in on one narrow portion to say "Burglaries are increasing." With respect to the author of the article Peggy O'Hare, who's a good reporter, that's reaching to generate conflict when the data doesn't really support it.