EDITORIAL: Local Politicians and the Truth
YPSILANTI MAYOR PRO Tempore, Lois Richardson, a black woman, was taken to task by unnamed editorialists in The Ann Arbor News—published by MLive Media Group, a company controlled by a team of 23 white executives. Richardson was criticized for saying at the Jan. 9, 2014 Ypsilanti City Council meeting: “Ypsilanti is a lot safer than Ann Arbor is. They just don’t let you know what’s going on in Ann Arbor.” The Ann Arbor News editorialists used the FBI’s 2013 crimes per thousand data to rebuke Richardson: there were 8.28 crimes per thousand in Ypsilanti versus 2.11 in Ann Arbor.
It’s time for media and local elected officials, particularly in Ann Arbor, to tell the whole story. Both the Ypsilanti Police Department and the Eastern Michigan University Police Department have much higher clearance rates than do the University of Michigan Police Department and the Ann Arbor Police Department. Criminal justice experts tell us that clearance rates, and not the number of crimes committed, are the more important data to use when drawing conclusions about safety and policing efficacy.
In 2013, according to Michigan State Police data Ann Arbor police cleared 35 percent of 6,440 crimes and U-M police cleared 39 percent of 1,833 crimes. Ypsilanti Police cleared 54 percent of 3,295 crimes and the EMU Police Department cleared 70 percent of 1,136 crimes. In Ann Arbor, then, 4,186 crimes remained uncleared. Of the 3,295 crimes reported to the Ypsilanti Police Department, 1,515 crimes remained uncleared in 2013. In Ypsilanti, there were more crimes per thousand, but in Ann Arbor thousands more crimes remained uncleared.
Crimes aren’t just numbers: they represent victims, people who turned to the criminal justice system for help. Ann Arbor police have an enormous backlog of uncleared cases, over 9,000 since just 2011, representing thousands of people whose victimizations remain unresolved and for whom justice has been elusive.
Local elected officials continue to waffle on funding for police because the focus has not been on clearance rates, but rather on number of crimes committed, particularly violent crime. Politicians and police departments have been caught by independent auditors manipulating crime numbers. The AAPD’s crime data have never been independently audited and should be.
The Jan. 2015 editorial criticizing Lois Richardson smacks of sexism and racism. The current iteration of The Ann Arbor News, and its predecessor AnnArbor.com, have never editorialized our city’s white elected officials need to “speak the truth” despite many opportunities to do so. Quite the opposite, in 2011 AnnArbor.com published a letter about the city’s debt written by then Council member Chris Taylor to his constituents in which Taylor understated the city’s total debt by half—some $250,000,000.
Since 2005, the AAPD has reported well over 40,000 crimes committed but cleared, on average, less than one-third of them, leaving tens of thousands of victims without justice and criminals at large. Ypsilanti Mayor Pro Tem Richardson did speak the truth. Ann Arbor officials have not let the public know what’s going on, and in the process masked a serious issue that deserves attention.