An editorial page report in The Wall Street Journal on December 3rd challenges the methods police departments in the United States use to count crimes. According the article's author, Lawrence Sherman, who is chairman of the University of Maryland's department of criminology and criminal justice, police departments often fail to follow the Federal Bureau of Investigation's national standards on crime classification. U.S. police departments have recently been criticized for not taking written reports on all crimes or of downgrading reports to less serious offenses. According to the Journal , criminologists have for many years known that police reporting is a mess. No two agencies classify crime in exactly the same way.
Many offenses lie on the boundary between two different crime types.
The police overrate the seriousness of some offenses. Legislators are increasingly making behavior that was previously annoying or innocuous into criminal offenses. The Post contends that although the police are writing more traffic tickets, there is no statistical evidence to support the public perception that aggressive driving is growing or making roads more perilous, according to traffice safety researchers, the insurance industry, and law enforcement officials. In fact, federal highway safety data indicate that America's roads have never been safer, with the rates of traffic deaths, injuries, and crashes all in a steady decline. There is nothing in traffic accident statistics that indicates aggressive driving is increasing.