CRIME IS UP! CRIME IS DOWN! CRIME IS SIDEWAYS? Iain Murray comments on the new FBI crime figures. Excerpt:

The really interesting news is in the regional variation. Crime grew in the West by 6%, with violent crime up 2%, murder up almost 8%, property crime up 6%, burglary up 6% and auto theft up an amazing 15%. These numbers wiped out the continuing decreases in crime in the Northeast and Midwest and the static rate in the South. The West coast is facing a real crime problem that the rest of the country is not.

Interesting. I wonder what could account for that?

UPDATE: Reader John Roney emails:

CA’s largest city, LA, has had a police force in disarray. Crime rates up. SF has the lowest rate of solving murders of any major city in the US. (Which was news to the police chief). Seattle had a PC police force that was not very effective, riots pushed out chief, new guy not much better. Oakland has had a record 100+ murders this year.

These are just the cities that I am familiar with. So it could be a case that a confluence of lousy police departments at some of the West’s largest cities is throwing the average off.

Hmm. I wonder. It’s not like all the big East Coast police forces are so great, but I suppose only DC counts as a true disaster.

UPDATE: Reader Ashby Beal deplores my prejudice against the District of Columbia and demands evidence that its police force is a disaster. Well, it was a disaster when I lived there. According to this 1997 article from The New Republic it was a disaster in 1997:

In the District of Columbia, where the violent crime rate is triple the national average, the fundamental processes of law enforcement have simply broken down. A properly functioning police system should clear homicide cases–that is, a suspect is arrested and indicted–at a rate of at least 75 percent. The homicide clearance rate in the District is at the moment hovering around the terrifyingly low level of 30 percent, which means that in 70 percent of killings, no one is ever indicted, much less convicted. No other major police department in America approaches this level of cataclysmic failure. Even the problem-plagued Los Angeles Police Department, which must cope with large-scale and chronic gang warfare, clears 54 percent of its homicides.

And the failure of the homicide branch is merely a part of the whole. With 663 officers per 100,000 residents, Washington has almost three times more cops than the national average. Despite this, its Metropolitan Police Department barely functions.

I haven’t seen any evidence of improvement. Am I missing something?

UPDATE: D.C. Reader Doug Jordan emails:

Oh, BTW, the DC police force, while not exactly crack, is not a disaster at the moment. The homicide clearance rate is awful, but given the amount of intramural drug violence that goes into the statistics, that is going to be hard to fix. The current police chief is media-savvy and shakes things up on occasion. And the force could give lessons to some third world nations in riot control after the past couple of years of globalization demonstrations.