A crime threefer

Houston on pace to post 20% decline in homicides in 2023

Houston’s homicide rate is down 20% compared to the year before, outpacing a historic decline in killings nationwide.

The city logged 339 homicides thorough Dec. 18, down from 425 over the same period in 2022, according to Houston police.

That drop is steeper than the 9.4% decline noted nationwide through the first half of 2023, which would be the largest decrease in around 50 years, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.

Researchers behind the study highlighted a range of reasons for the decline, saying the nation is coming off a large spike in homicides in 2020, and credited police policy changes and new crime-fighting initiatives.

Ernesto Lopez, a research specialist with the council, cautioned that it will be some time before those in law enforcement can draw firm conclusions based on the data. And we are still settling back into normal after the pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis upended law enforcement in many big cities across the country,

“When you have multiple events occurring at the same time, it makes it difficult to measure the influence of specific factors,” he said. “But once things return to normal, you can see the trends.”

City leaders in Houston, including Mayor Sylvester Turner and Police Chief Troy Finner, have touted increased homicide clearance rates and additional funding as contributing to the decline in homicides in 2023.

Lopez said the fact that many cities across the country are experiencing a decline in homicide suggests larger factors may be at play.

Lopez said a host of political, criminal and cultural factors muddy the numbers. For instance, the nationwide spike in homicides actually predates the pandemic and Floyd’s death.

“The first two months of 2020, homicides were up about 25% already,” he said.

Other crime is down as well. It may be awhile before we have a clear idea of what was going on in terms of causality. Obviously, the pandemic was a huge part of it, but there were more things happening as well. We’re still arguing about the causes of the crime increases from the 60s into the 90s and the subsequent long and steep drop in crime that followed, so expect this to be contentiously debated more or less forever. And hold that thought about data for a minute.

Chief Troy Finner wants all Houstonians to install security cameras or license plate readers

Facing a stagnating police force, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner is asking everyone in the city, both business owners and individual residents, to install security cameras and license plate readers in a bid to tamp down on crime.

The initiative, dubbed Project Safe View, has not yet received any city funding to help purchase cameras, Finner said. But he said the measure, if widely adopted, would help detectives with their investigations and serve as a possible deterrent to would-be criminals.

“If criminals knew, coming into this city, that on every block was some type of camera or license plate reader, that might help deter crime,” he said.

Some local groups, such as the Houston Association of Realtors, have praised the initiative, arguing it can only help safeguard Houstonians. But an expert who has closely studied the use of cameras and law enforcement says research shows more cameras might help the department’s clearance rates. But cameras’ use as a deterrent to crime is far less clear.

“They can be good for investigations, but not for deterring crime in the first place,” said Penny Geyer, a doctoral lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Some research has shown temporary declines in crime in the immediate aftermath of a camera’s installation, Geyer said. But any improvements are short-lived.

I mean, there are lots of reasons why one might be hesitant about installing a doorbell camera or other Internet-connected surveillance system in their homes, regardless of the potential value they may have in crimefighting. The debate about the value of security cameras and other forms of security technology is as longstanding and unresolved as the debate over why crime rates do what they do. I do believe they are an asset in solving crimes that have already happened. Discouraging them from happening in the first place, color me skeptical.

Houston’s crime stats show a safer city. Is that the whole story? (Editorial)

An FBI report that gathers figures from police departments across the nation shows a 1.7 percent drop in violent crime from 2021 to 2022, but a national survey released this month by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that the share of people who said they were victims of a violent crime jumped from 16.4 in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 persons in 2022. This kind of gap isn’t unusual but the two reports have rarely disagreed so much.

Here at home, the most recent Houston Police Department statistics show that reported violent crime has dropped almost 10 percent from last year. There’s no local survey asking people if they were victims to give us an idea of unreported violent crime but people polled before the recent mayoral election identified crime as the top issue.

This discrepancy defies easy explanation. Murder rates are considered accurate because few homicides go unreported, but other categories are murkier.

Experts believe the inconsistent data could be a result of fewer residents reporting crimes when they happen. There are several possible explanations for that hesitancy, from a basic lack of trust in law enforcement in some communities to remarkably low police response times, which have been exacerbated by an over-reliance on flawed technology such as ShotSpotter, an alert system that officers prioritize even though it rarely leads to arrests.

Whatever the reason, lacking data has far-reaching consequences. Houston ought to help lead the way nationally on improving the rate at which people report crimes. If HPD statistics don’t give the full picture on which neighborhoods have crime problems, the department won’t know where best to deploy resources.

Even when victims report crimes, the Houston region has a problem making sure officers can access the data. While Whitmire has said he wants to hire and recruit hundreds more police officers, he also acknowledges that the city’s dozens of law enforcement agencies — there are more than 60 departments in Harris County, according to a Kinder Institute study — should be able to better serve residents simply by breaking out of their respective silos and talking to each other. Integrating databases surely would be a massive technical and political headache, but one well worth the effort.

Obviously having better data would help. That we are finally doing some studies on gun violence should also help. Making sure we understand that data and properly deploy resources in response to it, that will really help. As for the gap between people’s perceptions of crime and the reality of how much crime there is, this is another evergreen matter. Has there ever been a time when people thought the crime rate was lower and that their neighborhoods were safer than what the data said? I grew up during a time when crime was measurably worse than it is now – hell, I came to Houston at a time when we had twice as many murders in a year as we’ll have this year, with far fewer people in the city – and I’m here to tell you the answer to that is almost certainly “never”. Maybe one other possible way to address that problem is in how crime is reported and often sensationalized in the media. Which, to be fair, is just giving the people what they want – I can’t imagine ever talking someone out of their belief that crime is rampant and they’ll probably be murdered any time now. I still support there being better data available, just in case.

Two more points. One, the issue of different law enforcement agencies not working together as well as they could, this too is a long-standing matter. It was a plank in Annise Parker’s Mayoral campaign in 2009. I’m sure we’ve tried to make some progress since then, but I have no idea how much has been made. I’m not even sure we have defined metrics for that, which makes any kind of measurement that much more difficult. It seems to me this is the sort of thing that could be addressed by the Legislature, if they weren’t busy telling police departments to take on tasks for which they weren’t trained and aren’t funded. And two, perhaps one additional reason why fewer people may be reporting crimes is the belief that the crimes they report aren’t going to get solved anyway. If we want to get into the “better data leads to better outcomes” business, let’s start with more transparency on HPD’s solve rates, so we can be clearer about where to focus our efforts.

Related Posts:

• Houston’s violent crime rate drops in 2023
• Some of those dropped HPD cases were connected to other cases
• More on the HPD dropped cases