Democracy In Albany

Or is it propaganda?

Happened to be watching the CBS affiliate late news last night (Ch. 6) and Mr. Blow-Dry anchorman did a sweet little puff piece for Mayor Jer and Police Chief Jimmy pants-on-fire Tuffey.

There was Mr. Blow-Dry (formerly of the Fox affiliate) putting Lil' Jimmy on TV and Jimmy was all bubbly saying that crime rates were falling.  Then something funny happened.  Blow-Dry got all goose-bumpy saying `some crime-rates were falling by double digits' but then when he showed four crime categories on the screen all four were down but one was down by a paltry 1%, another by a tiny 2% and only two were down by double digits as Blow-Dry had led you to believe.

THEN Mr. Blow-Dry throws in, almost as an afterthought `not all rates are down...

RAPE IS UP'.  

Holy shit, Batman!

But this little stat nugget about rapes being UP is only thrown in toward the end of the story. Mr. Blow-Dry easily could have approached this story another way, for example they could have led with `Rape crimes are up in Albany'.  But Blow-Dry didn't lead-off that way and by this time in the story you've been told what to think for dozens of seconds and the basic message is one that Lil' Jimmy is desperately trying to get out:  `everything's under control, nothing to see here, move along'.

Here's the real problem without all the happy talk.  Crime rates in Albany are very high and have been very high for years and years.  In 2005 the Albany crime rates were particularly bad. There is no real evidence of a multi-year trend down in any of the major crime rates and getting a rate to drop by one or two percent ain't much.

The rates shown on the TV screen were cherry-picked because they showed some drop, but there are seven major crime stats that the NYS Division of Criminal Justice Services tracks for the feds. DCJS tracks murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny & motor vehicle theft.  So out of the seven, the story only really talks about two that have shown a real drop. Furthermore, you can slice and dice stats so you can make almost any stat or trend sound good if you are tricky enough, and Jerry the Tan and his crew have shown a real ability for being very tricky in this area.

Albany has a real crime problem.  There are big gang problems and big illegal gun problems. Many of the crime problems stem from very serious poverty in certain Albany nabes and from poor race relations. This is one of Albany's dirty little secrets that the Mayor tries desperately to hide and cover-over.

There is also a bad atmosphere in Albany. People in certain neighborhoods sometimes feel they are hassled without cause. The biggest number of complaints that the Albany Citizens Police Review Board gets is "unprofessional conduct".

Here's an interesting example of a complaint about "unprofessional conduct" from a recent Review Board report:

an off-duty officer in uniform threatened and intimidated the complainant by pounding on her window and screaming obscenities at her following a traffic accident.

You can check the Albany Citizen Police Review Board reports yourself at:
http://www.albanylaw.edu/sub.php?navigation_id=1137

Don't get me wrong. I have an endless amount of respect for people who want to be police officers, it's a hard job and it's very hard to know exactly the right tone to take for every situation when you only have seconds to size up the scene.  You can't really tell from the complaint why Officer McScreamy went off on the woman at the accident. Maybe there was a good reason, maybe not, I don't know.

I don't want to totally trash Mr. Blow-Dry, he's the reporter and he can choose whatever angle he wants for his story.  At least he actually SAID something about the rising rate of rapes in the City of Albany - he could have just ignored the rape statistics and the whole story could have been `happy news' - `crime is falling' - `la la la'.  So while WRGB wasn't TOTALLY in the BAG for Lil' Jimmy, the story still plays more like a booster video than a news story. It's too bad TV viewers can't get a story from a reporter with better critical-thinking skills.