As a sociology instructor at Washington State University, I found Andy Matarrese’s Jan. 20 front-page story “Local Angle: Vancouver count of violent crimes up 18% in first half of 2015” to be misleading and alarmist, if not irresponsible.
The FBI report the story refers to only compares data from the first six months of 2014 to the first six months of 2015, which makes no sense; we should not make one-year comparisons of crime data, let alone six-month comparisons.
The reporter didn’t give a breakdown of the crimes. The FBI’s violent crime index comprises four offenses: murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Why did the reporter not highlight that in the first six months of 2014 there were four murders in Vancouver, but zero in the first six months of 2015? The number of forcible rapes increased by two, and the number of robberies went from 74 to 55.
If we project out based on the first six months of data (also not the best idea), we could estimate that there would have been 636 violent crimes in Vancouver in 2015. If we compare those data to those of 2010 (a more reasonable comparison), it would actually represent a 5 percent decline.
So don’t necessarily lock your doors and hide your children just yet.
