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Investigation refutes Bluffs’ ranking as one of 100 most dangerous cities in the U-S

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March 20th, 2014 by Ric Hanson

An investigation by The Daily NonPareil indicates a website’s ranking of Council Bluffs as one of the 100 most dangerous cities in the country, is misleading. The paper cites a number of errors in the NeighborhoodScout.com report, that ranked Council Bluffs 56th in the nation in the “100 most dangerous places to live in the U.S.” list. The report used information from the 2012 FBI Uniform Crime Report released in November of 2013 to make its assessment.

Retired Council Bluffs Police Chief Ralph O’Donnell and Capt. Terry LeMaster pointed out the report’s errors to the paper while discussing the ranking. LeMaster said in 2012 the department switched software for tracking crimes and also switched how the information was recorded. In the past, members of the department’s records division took field reports and entered them into the system, but with the new software, created by the Iowa Department of Transportation, officers in the field began entering the information. There was a glitch that caused the program to list incidents such as a Simple Assault, as an Aggravated Assault (a more serious crime) in the field called “Uniform Crime Report.”

Another example cited by O’Donnell, was a single incident being reported as more than one crime. For instance, if during a vehicle burglary a window was broken, the shattered window went down as criminal mischief on top of the burglary.

The year in which the error was occurring, 2012, showed 590 aggravated assaults, compared to 416 in 2013 – after the fix – and 486 in 2011, before the process change occurred. The department fixed the problem and returned to its old method, having records personnel input reports. The report may also be misleading based on how other cities disclose their crime.

The FBI, for its part, warns against using the report for rankings or comparison, for caveats that include the fact that not everybody reports, and some agencies may leave out information or report extra information to garner more of those federal funds. The Bureau warns that using the crime report to create rankings is a simplistic route to examining the data that provides “no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular region,” including demographics and geography, according to the report’s website. Furthermore, it says the rankings “Lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions.”