Posted By CotoBlogzz 07-30-2010
Last week, Attorney General Jerry Brown released what he characterized an
"encouraging 2009 annual report
showing that hate crimes in California fell by more than 20% last year”,
but warned that “ we are still a long
way from ending bigotry and prejudice.” According to the Attorney General,
the decline in hate crimes reflects an overall drop on all types of crime in
California. At about the same time, the Anti-Defamation League reported a sharp increase in hate
crime incidents in California last
year. Amanda Susskind, regional
director for the organization said the
trend was troubling and and blamed the increase in anti-Semitic incidents, on
the confluence of the election of President Obama, the recession and the
Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.
Is this a case of
figures don’t lie, but liars figure? Or
is this a case of only seeing what you want to see? Or what about another plausible explanation for the diametrically
opposed views? Hold your thoughts:
Last month we reported on the waste of tax-payer money
associated with Attorney General Gerry Brown's 2009 Legalized Murder
Protection Act Special Report. In all
fairness, the AG’s office is simply doing what the parasitic California
Legislature intended when it enacted Bill 780, the 2002 Reproductive Rights Law Enforcement
Act requiring the Attorney General to collect and analyze information on crimes
that violate reproductive rights and submit a report to the Legislature
(California Penal Code section 13777), where section 13776(a) of the California
Penal Code defines an anti-reproductive-rights crime as a crime “committed
partly or wholly because the victim is a reproductive health services client,
provider, or assistant, or a crime that is partly or wholly intended to
intimidate the victim, any other person or entity, or any class of persons.”
- view this as the Legalized Murder Protection Act (LMPA). In this case, there were some 10 or so
reported cases
Now,
in looking at traffic incidents and crime & vandalism trends in certain
communities in Orange County, we have been able to establish predictable cause-and-effect for traffic incidents using
California Highway Patrol statistics.
On the other hand, trending crime and vandalism using Orange County
Sheriff Department data is a bit more challenging: In one case, a couple of years back, we were able to trace major
quarter-to-quarter variances on system change-over at the department. We have been unable to trace the last major
discrepancy in the data for the second quarter of 2010. The point is that unless local law
enforcement data collection is driven by a closed loop corrective action system
where the data is not only collected locally, but also corrective action is
taken and documented immediately, there is no guarantee that as the data flows
up to the California Justice Department, it is remotely comparable to what goes
on in real life. View the current
system more as a case of GIGO – garbage-in-garbage-out.
Worse,
the system as currently implemented, lends itself to corruption and or
political manipulation – no unlike the recent case of deputies in the Los Angeles Central Jail using
fake bar codes to check in, and managers being clueless this was going on.
So,
the question as to who is right? California’s
AG Jerry Brown, when he says that hate crimes are going down, or the Anti-Defamation League when it reports hate-crimes are
going up? The answer may be both are
right. Most plausible explanation is
that the AG is using un-checked, unreliable data from local law enforcement
agencies, whereas the Anti-Defamation League is more provincial and hence has a
better handle on the data. In any case,
a definitive answer can only be had when the law enforcement union allows for a
closed loop corrective action in all its data gathering and retrieval
processes.
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