Public Safety

These story ideas were suggested by California Watch reporter Ryan Gabrielson, the 2009 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting. Feel free to explore these ideas in your community. Let us know what you find.

Down the street
Good journalism often begins with a basic question: What’s going on around here? A quick way to kick-start your public safety coverage is to look at what kinds of criminal activity and law enforcement are taking place in your own neighborhood. Increasingly, police departments publish maps on their websites that show the location of reported crimes and when they happened. Zoom in to find out if your block appears to have a significant number of reported violent or property crimes, then compare this year’s figures to those for the same time period during the previous two or three years. File public records requests to obtain the actual police reports for the incidents you plan to write about.

More money
Keeping the public safe is not a 9-to-5 job. So law enforcement must often pay officers to work additional hours to fully investigate crimes or keep patrol beats staffed. That said, police agencies are regularly found to be abusing overtime, sometimes spending millions of taxpayer dollars a year to give officers extra cash for dubious purposes. To get overtime data (you’ll need the information in an electronic format to analyze), file a public records request to the police agency for a records set that details all overtime pay for the previous year or so. Find out which officers or divisions rack up the largest amount of overtime pay and ask the agency for precise answers as to why the expense is justifiable.

Case closed
Are police departments solving crimes? The answer to that simple question is critical to assessing how well a police department is doing its job. The answer is often complex, as there is no one statistic that tells the whole story of an agency’s performance on criminal investigations. Police departments calculate and report a “clearance” rate that shows what percentage of cases it closed during a year; the departments typically also provide clearance rates by crime category (i.e., homicide, sexual assault, armed robbery). However, the details of how a department clears a case can be as important as the overall rate. For example, what percentage of homicide investigations end in arrest? Most police departments make their clearance rate data readily available.

Emergency response
Speed matters to the public when intruders are breaking into a house or armed robbers are pointing a gun at a store clerk. The national standard for response time on the most serious emergency calls is five minutes. Nearly all police departments keep electronic records (available through a public records request) that document what time such calls come in, what police precinct or ZIP code the calls come from, what time officers are dispatched, and what time they arrive at the scene.

Death row and race
Are minority inmates disproportionately represented on California’s list of condemned inmates? Review the state’s list of condemned prisoners and find out.

Crime statistics
The figures police agencies release – most notably Uniform Crime Reports – document crimes reported to police or ones that officers observe. They do not include all criminal activity. The FBI gathers and publishes the UCR data, but does not check the statistics’ veracity. Further, law enforcement agencies sometimes differ in how they categorize certain offenses, making it difficult to compare rates of crime between regions with accuracy. Reporters and others who cover criminal justice should test the accuracy of data by reviewing related police reports and other records in addition to interviewing officers, suspects, victims, prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses and others affected by criminal activity.