Spotty record keeping leaves gaps in crime statistics
Some area communities plagued by budget cuts last year stopped submitting monthly crime reports to the state, saying their resources were better spent keeping officers on the streets than tallying statistics at a computer.
As a result, a recent State Police report tracking local crime trends -- showing a general rise in violent- and property-crime rates in many suburban areas --
lacked complete information on communities south of Boston, making it difficult to see the full picture.
"There appears to be a slight drop in towns submitting" the reports, said Lieutenant Edward Principe, a State Police spokesman. His agency compiles the reports, and on Monday issued its summary comparing 2002 figures with previous years.
Principe couldn't give specifics on the decrease, but said that during past times of severe budget cuts, a number of communities decided to allocate their resources for uses other than crime reports. "However, we do encourage full participation," said Principe, who declined to comment when asked whether State Police officials were concerned by the drop in reports submitted.
Most police departments with missing crime reports blamed dwindling resources for their lack of participation. Although many officials described the crime statistics as useful, they noted that local figures are often available in annual town reports.
"It absolutely is something we should be doing. It helps us look at crime rates and justify the need for resources," said Rochester Police Chief Paul Magee, whose department hasn't submitted a report since 1983.
Of 48 cities and towns in the region south of Boston, 33 have provided crime reports fairly consistently over the past two decades. Although economic, or property, crime rose sharply across the state in 2001 and 2002, with the greatest increases in the suburbs, such incidents have dropped in nearly every reporting community in the region over the past 20 years. Most of these reporting communities saw lower property crime rates for 2000-2002 than 1980-1982; about a third saw a rise in violent crime rates.
Hingham was one of the largest police departments in the state not reporting their crime numbers. The town failed to do so for the past three years, and Hingham Police Chief Steve Carlson said the department just did not have the staff for the "labor-intensive" work.
In the past, superior officers compiled these reports, but internal promotions recently left a gap in those ranks. This forced Carlson to decide whether to take a patrol officer off a beat to compile statistics, or not report them at all.
"I was caught between a rock and a hard place," Carlson said.
He said the department, however, has since found staff to track the crime reports, and has been submitting the town's figures for the current year.
Last year, the West Bridgewater Police Department only provided two monthly reports to the State Police. Internal staff changes, combined with a lack of resources, accounted for the oversight, according to Lieutenant Raymond Rogers.
"It's very time consuming," Rogers said. "It's hard to take a cop off the streets to do office work."
Like Hingham, however, West Bridgewater has since promoted a new sergeant who will focus on the crime report work.
Several police departments have rarely submitted reports over the past 20 years.
In Plympton, a rural community with about 2,700 residents, police provided three monthly reports in 1980, but none since then.
Plympton Police Chief Matthew Clancy said that unless filing the crime reports becomes a requirement, he doesn't plan on devoting the resources to compiling the numbers.
"I have a whole host of mandates and not a whole lot of people to deal with them," Clancy said, adding that local crime statistics are available in the town's annual report.
The Rochester Police Department sees it differently. When Magee took over as chief in January, he realized the department wasn't tracking crimes, and immediately invested in new computer systems to more easily generate the data.
He said his department would be submitting a report to the state at the next deadline.
Jenn Abelson can be reached at abelson@globe.com.
