Cleveland Heights crime statistics for the first half of 2017

Overall January-June crime trend in Cleveland Heights, 2011–17

The following charts present a year-to-year comparison of serious crimes reported in Cleveland Heights during the first six months of each year, 2011 through 2017. Full-year data will be reported here when it becomes available through the Cleveland Heights Police Department’s data-management process—typically around April. 

These crime reports are not subjective. Since 2011, the CHPD has emphasized consistency with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) guidelines—a regimented, clearly defined set of rules for classifying and reporting crime that has been updated continually since being introduced in 1930.

The purpose of the UCR codes is to create a barometer to identify whether crime is trending up or down. The FBI’s UCR website cautions that the information is not reliable for comparing the crime rate of one city with another, due to important differences between locales, such as population density and distance from an urban center. Further, though the FBI doesn’t come out and say it, not all agencies are consistent in the care they take when reporting crime data.

The data reported here don't account for every crime that takes place in the city. Rather, they represent serious crimes as defined in Part I of the UCR guidelines: violent crimes against people—murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault; and serious crimes against property—burglary, theft, auto theft and arson.

The FBI does not collect data on the more numerous Part II crimes—such as trespassing, disorderly conduct, sexual imposition, public intoxication, drunk driving—because the rigorous classification process would be too costly for municipal police departments to apply to these lesser offenses. 

For more informaiton about how the CHPD collects and validates crime statistics, and why the Observer publishes them, see the original article in this series by scanning the QR code or visiting http://bit.ly/chcrimestats.

Bob Rosenbaum

Cleveland Heights resident Bob Rosenbaum is co-chair of the Heights Observer Advisory Committee, and is responsible for its advertising sales and market development.

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Volume 10, Issue 12, Posted 9:52 AM, 11.21.2017