Many crimes don't end in arrest

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Robbers, muggers, even rapists escape the law with alarming frequency in Schenectady. It’s another story for murderers — police almost always catch them.

For almost every non-fatal crime, Schenectady’s arrest rate has fallen far below the national standard, with the vast majority of the city’s most serious crimes going unsolved over the past three years.

The arrest rate is so low that Schenectady City Councilman Gary McCarthy said the Police Department should be completely reorganized to put more police on the street.

“This is an embarrassment,” McCarthy, the Public Safety Committee chairman, said after the city released the 2005-07 arrest rates in response to a Freedom of Information request from The Sunday Gazette.

He said most of the arrest rates will leave residents feeling shaken and unsafe — particularly the rate for arresting burglars.

“If 95 percent of the burglaries go unsolved, how do you create value in the community? You should be able to feel safe and secure in your home,” McCarthy said.

According to the city’s records, police also solve only a fraction of the city’s nonviolent break-ins and gunpoint robberies, posting results that are less than half the national arrest rate.

But the national rates aren’t great either, with more than three-quarters of most crimes going unsolved.

For example, in statistics adjusted by the Department of Justice to be proportionate to Schenectady’s population, the average city solved only 13 percent of its burglaries in 2006. Schenectady police made an arrest in 7 percent of its burglaries that year.

Schenectady historically does well in solving murders, making arrests in nearly every killing. The city usually posts an annual rate of 100 percent for murders while the national adjusted rate hovers around 60 percent.

The city’s arrest rate for arsons usually matches the national rate, at about 18 percent.

But Schenectady is far below average in arrest rates for every other serious crime.

Lagging behind

Only about 20 percent of the city’s rapes get solved each year, based on Schenectady police data from 2005 through 2007. Nationally, police make an arrest in nearly 40 percent of all reported rapes.

The police also make arrests in about 35 percent of Schenectady’s aggravated assaults — serious beatings and attacks with weapons — while the national rate is about 55 percent.

McCarthy said months ago that the arrest rates will be a central part of his campaign to change the police department’s priorities in the 2009 budget. The council will begin work on the budget in less than three weeks.

But Commissioner of Public Safety Wayne Bennett said it’s not fair to compare Schenectady to a per capita arrest rate garnered from every police department in the country. It would be fairer, he said, to compare Schenectady to cities with the same number of police, a similarly-sized police budget and a community made up of a similar number of poor and affluent residents.

“Using the national average, strictly based on no other information than population, is not a reliable means of comparison,” he said.

But Schenectady does not fare much better when compared to Troy, which faces similar economic woes, has roughly the same percentage of its population living below the poverty level and posted the same median income in the 1999 census report. It is also the same size as Schenectady but has about 14,000 fewer residents. It has a police force of 118 officers while Schenectady has 165 officers.

Compared to troy

Troy also did not meet the national arrest rate average in all crime categories, but it did far better than Schenectady. Last year, Troy solved nearly half its rapes and arsons while Schenectady made arrests in 20 percent of the rapes and 7 percent of the arsons. Troy also solved two-thirds of its aggravated assaults — compared to 37 percent in Schenectady — and posted a solve rate for auto thefts that was twice as good as Schenectady’s.

In robberies and burglaries, Troy also posted a better rate. Only in larcenies — stealing from a person — did Troy’s arrest rate of 9 percent fall short of Schenectady’s rate, which was 11 percent.

Bennett also argued that a true review of the statistics would include analyzing every incident and eliminating those for which there were no “solvability factors” — evidence, witnesses and other factors.

“You can’t look at the percentage and say, based on the numbers, performance is good or bad. You need to get into the cases,” he said. “With rape, if she doesn’t know her attacker, if there is no DNA evidence able to be collected, and there’s no witnesses — what do you have?”

But he acknowledged that such factors can’t explain why Schenectady’s arrest rate is so much worse than the national rate for cities of Schenectady’s size.

“In relation to cities of similar size, I think the issues are the same,” he said.

McCarthy also believes there’s no mitigating factors to explain the discrepancy between Schenectady’s arrest rate and the national rate.

Cops on the street

But he’s confident that the gap can be bridged if the Schenectady City Council will support his effort to change the department’s 2009 budget. He declined to offer details before the public meetings on the budget but said he will present a plan that would put far more officers on patrol.

“I believe our fundamental thing is to put more cops on the street, so when people call, the resources are there,” he said.

He argued that he can improve the arrest rate with better funding.

“You put your resources on something, you’re going to solve the problem,” he said.

Bennett agreed that he could improve the arrest rate — but only if he’s given more officers. Crime-specific task forces could have an impact on burglaries and other serious crimes, Bennett said.

“I would say Gary [McCarthy] has a point there. Let’s say we have a burglary task force, we send guys out in plain clothes in certain zones and we look for burglaries. Would that improve solvability rates? I would certainly hope so,” he said.

But sometimes money just isn’t enough. In 2007, with a state grant, a specialized task force and a detective all dedicated to cracking down on motor vehicle theft, the police only managed to make arrests in seven cases. And despite their efforts, more cars were stolen than in either of the previous two years.

But in 2005, without a grant or a task force, police made arrests in 86 percent of the car thefts, solving all but five of the 36 thefts. The national rate that year was 12 percent.

In 2006, Schenectady’s rate for solving car thefts fell to 52 percent. In 2007, the rate was 11.5 percent — mirroring the national rate.

“We don’t know what happened in 2005,” police spokesman Brian Kilcullen said. “Unfortunately, we can’t attribute that to a grant.”

Even if task forces could be counted on to dramatically increase the city’s arrest rate, the department doesn’t have the staffing to run such a program. There are only enough officers to fill a task force on days when every officer shows up for work — with no one calling in sick, using a comp day or taking vacation, Bennett said.

“We don’t even remotely approach the staffing to do that on a regular basis,” he said. “There are issues with the wording in the [labor] contract that impede the ability of this department to operate. When you can take comp time with 24-hour notice, there’s absolutely no way to factor in the needs of the department.”

McCarthy is taking a more pragmatic approach. City leaders have been negotiating the comp time issue with the police union for more than a year, to no avail.

“But we can control the budget,” McCarthy said.

Detailed study

McCarthy’s Public Safety Committee has spent more than 10 months reviewing police statistics, and McCarthy has repeatedly said that the council should use its spending authority to redirect funds in ways that would improve the police department. He has focused on police response times, particularly the fact that it takes city police an average of 45 minutes to respond to calls about non-violent crimes.

Fix the response rate, McCarthy said, and the arrest rate will skyrocket.

“If a neighbor calls and says she sees a man creeping through backyards, if you send a cop there real quick you’re probably going to catch a burglar, or deter one from happening. You send an officer 20 minutes, two hours later — nothing,” McCarthy said. “We’ve got to have a greater presence on the street.”

Until the response time is improved, he said, police performance simply encourages criminals to commit more crimes.

“They know about the response rate,” he said.

Bennett said a faster response probably won’t lead to a higher arrest rate.

“A lot of these cases are not reported until a significant delay. People don’t report crimes in a timely fashion in many cases,” he said. “We had a bicycle robbery the other day. The kid didn’t have a phone. Now he’s got to find a phone. It takes 5 to 10 minutes. That significantly diminishes the solvability rate.”

But Bennett said he would enjoy the “luxury” of having additional officers for special task forces. He said he’d welcome more officers — unless they are simply reassigned from other areas.

“He has not shared his thoughts with me, but I’m worried we’ll have less detectives,” Bennett said of McCarthy’s plans. “If you rob Peter to pay Paul, something’s going to suffer. The detectives are part of the solve rate too, you know.”

Instead, Bennett said, police should triage cases, closing every case that seems unlikely to be solved.

“I really think we have to be realistic and tell people, ‘There are no solvability factors in this case,’ ” Bennett said. “We could spend less time on these cases.”