By Monotreme
Is Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey responsible for a sharp reduction in Ogden’s crime rate? His campaign webpage says he is:
Crime has dropped more than 23% since Matthew Godfrey became Mayor, including a drop in violent crimes of 43% compared with an increase of 21% during the 7 years before he took office. Moreover, the Mayor has put in place a zero-tolerance policy for gang-related crimes. He’s even asked for more immigration officers to come to Ogden to deport criminals that are caught here illegally. Without a doubt, Mayor Matthew Godfrey is tough on crime.Mayor Godfrey has claimed this reduction in crime during his administration several other places as well. For example, in the August 8, 2007 Standard-Examiner, announcing his gang crime measures, he’s quoted as saying, “We’ve had a precipitous decline in crime for the last eight years, and we’re not giving that up.”
“I’m thrilled with the 23% reduction in crime but I know we can achieve more. And as your mayor, I will continue to work hard to make your neighborhood even safer.” – Matthew Godfrey
Source: Ogden Police Department, Uniform Crime Report Statistics measured in crimes per 1,000 residents
There are several problems with this claim.
The first, and most obvious, is an example of the logical fallacy called, in Latin, post hoc ergo propter hoc — in English, “it happened, so (insert explanation here) must have caused it to happen”. Another way of saying this is the famous statistician’s phrase: “correlation doesn’t imply causality”.
Just because two things happen at the same time (in this case, Mayor Godfrey’s administration and a reduction in Ogden’s crime rate) doesn’t mean one led to the other.
Many students of criminal justice have argued that the crime rate has a lot more to do with demographic trends than with crime-fighting efforts. For example, the crime rate rises and falls with the number of males age 14 to 24 in the population, since almost all crimes are committed by males in that age group.
Did Mayor Godfrey’s efforts reduce crime in Ogden? One way of asking this question is, “did the reduction in crime fit the pattern of change in a different or larger population?” How does the crime rate in Ogden compare to the crime rate in the entire state of Utah?
As Mayor Godfrey’s web page indicates, these data are compiled in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR), issued annually. They’re available online at www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm. The last year with full data available is 2005.
The FBI breaks down these statistics into violent crimes (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) and property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson). In Ogden, and in Utah, as in the rest of the country, the overwhelming majority of crimes committed are property crimes.
Obviously, many more crimes are committed when lots of people are around. So, the UCR system levels this data for different places of different sizes by calculating the number of crimes per 100,000 population. (Not, as Mayor Godfrey’s web page asserts, per 1,000 population, but that’s a minor quibble.) To get the crime rate per 100,000 people, we simply divide the number of crimes by the population and multiply by 100,000. For example, for 1995, there were 422 violent crimes in Ogden and 69,290 people. 422 / 69,290 = 0.00609. 0.00609 x 100,000 = 609.0, the rate of violent crimes per 100,000 people.
The table below presents these data for the period 1995-2005:
Now, here’s the analysis of the data.
I can’t seem to reproduce Mayor Godfrey’s assertion that crime has been reduced in Ogden by 23% during his administration. In fact, comparing the years for which data are available (1995-1999, five years before Matthew Godfrey was mayor vs. 2000-2005, six years during which Godfrey was mayor), there appears to be a 28.5% reduction in the total crime rate (comparing the average of 8939.2, 9058.1, 9007.9, 8908.7, and 7989.9 vs. the average of 7726.6, 6678.4, 6656.8, 6488.3, 6911.9 and 6547.1). By this estimate, Mayor Godfrey is being modest.
However, for the entire state, there is a 31.7% reduction in crime comparing the same range of years. Ogden’s crime rate has dropped slightly more slowly than that for the entire state while Matthew Godfrey has been mayor.
Here’s the data as a graph:
Note that the crime rate for Ogden is higher than for the state as a whole. That’s expected, because Ogden is an urban area and much of the state is rural. It’s well known that crime rates are higher in urban areas.
What about that 43% drop in violent crimes?
It’s difficult to see any support for Mayor Godfrey’s assertion of a 43% drop in violent crime during his administration. There appears to be a slight reduction, 13% by my calculation, when comparing 1995-1999 data to 2000-2005 data. The comparable drop for the State of Utah over the same period is 24%.
There are several possible interpretations of the data shown here.
1. As he asserts on his campaign web page, Mayor Matthew Godfrey’s election reduced crime in Ogden.
2. Mayor Matthew Godfrey’s crimefighting skills are so strong, his election as Mayor of Ogden City didn’t just reduce crime in Ogden, but in the entire State of Utah.
3. The reduction in the number of crimes in Ogden had nothing to do with Mayor Godfrey’s administration.
Other, alternative, explanations are possible. I invite you to supply your own.
Mayor Matthew Godfrey may be “tough on crime”, as his web page asserts, but the data don’t support (or refute) that conclusion.
