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Area no longer tops in U.S. in property crime
By DAVID L. TEIBEL and BRAD BRANAN Published: 09.22.2006
For the first time since 2001, metro Tucson no longer has the nation's highest property crime rate, a change due in part to the way crime is reported.
Metro Tucson had 5,230 property crimes per 100,000 residents last year, the FBI said in its annual Crime in the United States report, released this week.
That's the 14th-highest rate out of 109 metro areas with 500,000 or more residents. Metro Tucson had the highest property crime rate for major metro areas in the three previous years.
The FBI collects statistics on auto theft, larceny and burglary to measure property crime.
Metro Tucson law enforcement agencies reported 9,109 property crimes last year, or about 1,000 fewer than the year before. One reason for the decrease is that the Tucson Police Department, which handles most metro-area crime, changed its reporting practices.
The department, responding in part to the high national ranking, last year stopped counting larceny reports unless the victim mailed in a report.
That was done after checking with other police agencies in America and determining that they did not count larcenies without a written report, said John Leavitt, the assistant chief in charge of the Tucson Police Department's Investigative Services Bureau.
The department used to count larcenies if a victim called the department to report the crime, but many victims never sent in the follow-up written report, Leavitt said, leading him to believe some victims had found property that was not stolen, just misplaced.
The department also found it was counting some thefts as many as two or three times, Leavitt said. For example, if a car was stolen with property in it, that was counted as two crimes. It now is counted as one.
Also, some victims would report a crime by telephone, send in a mail-in report and then meet an officer on the street and report it, resulting in one crime being counted as three, Leavitt said.
Other steps Tucson police took to reduce property crimes include creating a property theft detective division in 2004, joining the sheriff's computerized pawn tracking system late last year and creating a fully staffed surveillance squad last year that targets known burglars, Leavitt said.
The reduction in property crime rates also reflects a true crime reduction in burglaries, not a change in reporting methods, Leavitt said. The department has never used mail-in reports for burglaries and has always sent an officer to investigate reported burglaries and to personally fill out a written report, he said.
Leavitt said there were more than 1,000 fewer burglaries in the city last year compared with 2004. Tucson leads the metro area in crime statistics, Leavitt said.
"We're the largest contributor to the numbers. We're a little more than half the urban area," Leavitt said.
Metro Tucson also dropped slightly in violent crime rankings, going from 24th to 28th in the nation, although violent crime went up slightly. Last year, the area had 650 violent crimes - murder, robbery, rape and aggravated assault - per 100,000 residents. That's up from 640 per 100,000 residents.
Leavitt said a record number of people being released from prison, who return to violent ways, help boost Tucson's and the nation's violent crime rates. |
