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Altoona residents have not been sitting around for the past month pondering the contents of their police department's 2020 annual crimes report, delivered last month by Chief Joe Merrill, who became head of the department in March upon the retirement of Janice Freehling.
Nevertheless, anyone who read Mirror reporter William Kibler's article of July 13 about the chief's presentation to the city council on July 12 -- and who tried to digest all of what they were reading -- should have felt somewhat troubled about what the report did not reveal.
The chief deserves no blame for that. Rather, the problem rests with the Uniform Crime Reporting process to which Merrill and other police chiefs are required to adhere.
UCR is -- and always has been -- a flawed reporting system that, in fact, has made some communities appear safer than they actually are, while in rarer cases has given some communities a black eye that they did not deserve.
A statistics framework constructed atop a foundation of incomplete information cannot provide the kind of guidance necessary to deal with such an important topic as crime. More importantly and very troubling is that a statistical charade does not focus on the remedial measures that really are needed to address what ought to be subjects of focus.
In the case of the 2020 UCR, the report fails to deliver the city's need for a bigger complement of police protection, more in line with the 74-officer department that existed in the mid-2000s than the 62 officers budgeted for this year.
Meanwhile, the 2020 UCR charade does not in fact put pressure on Altoona's competent, dedicated city officials to do a better job regarding their public safety responsibility.
And there is an extension beyond that --to the taxpayers who fund city operations, including the police department, by way of their taxes.
Are they in fact not willing to pay a small amount more for a safer city? Has anyone really tried to find out, by way of presentation of the true story that UCR fails to deliver?
Finally, will there be a serious attempt to turn some of the flexibility that will be possible, thanks to money coming from Washington, into meaningful improvement of the police department's capabilities?
Regarding the report itself, the UCR's "hierarchy rule," which focuses on only the most serious offense in an incident involving more than one crime, makes a mockery of the crimes-committed compilation.
Couple that with a shortage of manpower that, as Merrill pointed out, forces the department to be reactive, rather than proactive, the city is missing opportunities to prevent some crimes from occurring.
All considered, that purported 1.78 percent rise in total crime in 2020 -- the number contained in the UCR -- is in reality meaningless because it is woefully inaccurate. Part of what needs to happen locally to reveal crime's true picture here already exists.
That is the National Incident-Based Reporting System that hasn't reached Altoona yet -- a crimes-data-compilation that would do away with the hierarchy rule and provide many more details of criminal incidents.
Altoona and other communities neither need nor want empty, deceptive statistical reports having no bases for true conclusions.