Ventura Police Criticized for Cutting Back on Crime Reports

City police have failed to record hundreds of property crimes each year since 1995, apparently violating FBI guidelines and skewing statistics that measure the city’s success in its war on crime.

In July 1995, Ventura police stopped immediately writing crime reports or routinely dispatching officers when citizens called to complain about petty thefts and minor burglaries. Instead, the department asked those crime victims to go to a police station to fill out a report or complete and return a report that police mailed to them.

But many people never bothered to report the crimes officially.

As a result, the number of crimes reported in Ventura has since dropped by almost half, from 5,533 to 2,955. Of that drop, 86% has been in burglary and theft reports, the two categories in which the city changed its guidelines.

Other area cities do not use such a procedure, citing FBI guidelines that agencies in the bureau’s Uniform Crime Reports program should write a crime report each time a citizen’s complaint is received.

Even large agencies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department, report each complaint by using civilian report takers, officials said. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department also responds to each complaint by dispatching a police cruiser, a spokesman said.

Ventura had the highest crime rate among Ventura County’s 10 cities in 1994, but now ranks well below Oxnard and Santa Paula, and its rate of offenses is approaching the county average. That is true even though its rate of violent crime--murder, rape, robbery and felony assault--is the same as in 1995.

Ventura Police Chief Mike Tracy said his department changed its reporting system because it wanted to spend more money fighting serious crimes, not counting minor ones.

He said the change has freed officers from taking reports in minor cases. It has put more police into neighborhood storefront stations, allowed them to concentrate on serious offenses and helped deploy more officers at schools, he said.

“It is a practical matter of trying to use the resources of our community the best way we can,” he said. “These are calls that generally don’t have a lot of investigative leads. It’s reporting, for example, the theft of a bicycle. And most citizens are capable of reporting this, and they do.”

Tracy said he plans no changes in the current system, although it was modified two years ago after burglary victims complained about not getting crime reports. Now officers respond to all burglaries, he said.

And Tracy said his department has been assured by the state Department of Justice--which monitors local crime reporting for the FBI--that Ventura’s methods are acceptable.

“We’ve told the [department] what we’re doing, and they tell us we’re in compliance,” he said.

But a Department of Justice spokesman said later that--although state auditors originally reassured Ventura that its policy was fine--officials have now decided to take a look at the department’s reporting procedures.

“It’s too early for our staff to say” there’s a problem, said Justice Department spokesman Michael Van Winkle. “But we’re going to speak with them and work with them about the possibility of reviewing their procedures. Our goal would be that, if they’re not meeting all requirements, then they would be in the future.”

Van Winkle said state auditors know of no other police agency in California that uses the same reporting system as Ventura, although some agencies take only enough information to comply with FBI reporting requirements, then direct victims to go to reporting centers to complete forms.

“Different agencies have different systems,” he said, “but they’re entering enough into the system to comply with [Uniform Crime Reports] requirements.”

Under its system, Ventura apparently fails to write up hundreds of crimes reported by residents each year.

A Police Department audit conducted a year or two after the 1995 reporting change found that only about 50% to 60% of forms sent to complaining residents were returned in burglary cases, mostly involving items stolen from garages, and that 53% to 70% were returned in theft cases.

In its annual report for 1999, the Police Department acknowledged that recent reductions in crime statistics resulted partly from the new method of reporting. “The decrease in theft and burglary is partially due to a change in crime reporting procedures and may not be as large as it appears,” the report said in a footnote.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook directs local police agencies to follow this minimum standard for reporting offenses:

“A permanent written record of each crime is made immediately upon receipt of a complaint or call for service. All reports of thefts and attempted thefts are included, regardless of the value of the property involved.”

The handbook also recommends strong administrative control over such information gathering “to ensure each [complaint] is promptly recorded and accurately tabulated. . . . An effective follow-up system is used to see that reports are promptly submitted in all cases.”

Tracy said he is not sure of the degree to which Ventura undercounts its property crimes. But he said the current system tracks trends reliably.

“You can follow the statistics as we’re reporting them, and see the trends in our community,” he said. “To me, that’s the most valuable use of those statistics.”

It’s true that Ventura had a huge drop of 683 theft and burglary reports in 1995, the first year the new system was used, Tracy said. But similar crime reductions have continued under the new system, he said. For example, theft reports dropped by 576 in 1999.

An FBI spokeswoman said the agency’s annual Crime in the United States Report relies on police agencies’ providing complete, accurate and comparable crime data. The authoritative crime report was started in 1930 to provide nationwide statistics used to determine trends and plot crime-fighting strategies.

But participation in the program is voluntary, so the FBI can only encourage police agencies to comply with its strict reporting guidelines, said Mary Victoria Pyne, chief of communications in the Uniform Crime Reports program. About 17,000 agencies participate, representing the vast majority of those in America.

“This doesn’t follow our procedures,” Pyne said of Ventura’s system. “But this is a voluntary program, so we can’t come in [like] gangbusters.”

She said the FBI employs “trainers” who respond when the agency discovers improper reporting. She said the trainer for California would contact auditors at the state Department of Justice about the Ventura situation.

If reporting procedures like Ventura’s were widespread, they could undermine the FBI’s crime report, she said. “Could this potentially be a problem? Of course it could,” she said. “It depends on the scale to which this is practiced. We have to go under the assumption that people are following our rules. And we have found, by and large, people do.”

Vernon Cooke, a lecturer at California Lutheran University and a former chief crime analyst for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, said Ventura’s altered reporting system creates planning problems for other agencies and distorts reality.

“In my mind, this is serious,” Cooke said. “That’s one of their primary functions--to report crime. That’s how policy is set. That’s what planning is based on. And citizens’ perception of safety is based on these reports.”