Rising Crime Rates Correlate with Transparency?
Crime is down since 2004, but violent crime is up in a few larger cities in the US according to (Click image to enlarge) the 2015 FBI reports released this month. We came across this chart in The Economist comparing the crime rate crime rate per 1000 people in 2004-2005 to 2014-2015 in a few of the most populated cities across the US. Of the cities listed, only one largely populated city has a lower crime rate than the national crime rate - Honolulu had a crime rate of 2.4 while the National crime rate came in at 3.5. We like to claim we can determine the quality of a police department depending on how the department makes crime data available. Since we only have anecdotal evidence to speak on this it’s simply an assumption. However, when we looked at the graph, we immediately noticed a correlation between transparency with crime data and the crime rates. The White House Police Data Initiative and the open data movement have really caught on the past couple of years an