Asbury Park Press

The homicide rate and overall crime rate in the U.S. have reportedly fallen the past two years after a worrisome spike the two previous years.

Has that trend held in New Jersey? Hard to say, thanks to major time lags on the part of the State Police in getting that information out to the public.

The only source of comprehensive publicly available crime statistics in New Jersey is the annual State Police Uniform Crime Report. Unfortunately, the most current report is for 2016. There are bare-bones preliminary reports from 2017 and through November of 2018 but State Police cautioned that they were unofficial and may not have included information from all departments.

OK, then, what about general trends? Were homicides in New Jersey up or down? By a little or a lot? Several inquiries to the Uniform Crime Unit, the State Police public information office and the state Attorney General's Office yielded no answers.

So what's the deal? A spokesperson from the AG's Office assured us that the State Police has the current data, and uses it to develop strategies to reduce crime. The information just isn't available to the public yet. Why? Because, we were told, the State Police, which gathers the information from all law enforcement departments and agencies, is working with a new vendor who is changing how data is collected and disseminated.

Will the Uniform Crime Reports be organized the same way they have been for more than three decades? We received no clear response. Why should that matter? Because the reports provide a comprehensive, apples-to-apples look at crime at the state, county and local level. Citizens deserve to be aware of the trends, statewide and in the communities where they work and live.

The quarterly state updates only provide preliminary statistics on major crimes. As such, they are of limited value. The annual reports include information about such things as marijuana and hate crime arrests, police department staffing levels, breakdowns of crimes committed by age, race and gender, five-year trends, comparisons to crime rates in the U.S. and Northeast, and much more.

The annual reports also include final clearance rates — the percentage of crimes committed in each major category that resulted in arrests or charges. We reported in a May 2016 article "Getting away with murder..." that New Jersey. which historically had much higher clearance rates than the U.S. average, was experiencing steadily declining rates.

As recently as the second half of the 1990s, more than 80 percent of homicides in New Jersey resulted in an arrest, according to the Uniform Crime Reports — 20 percentage points higher than the national average for 1995-1999. Between 2010 and 2014, New Jersey’s annual clearance average was down to 54 percent — four points below the national average. Clearance rates in New Jersey for rape also fell sharply between 1995 and 2014 — from 58.2 percent to 31.4 percent.

If the rates in the preliminary 2017 report are to be believed, those clearance rates have fallen even further. Are the numbers to be trusted? If so, what gives?

The annual reports provide a wealth of information that can be — or at least should be — used by policymakers to respond to a variety of public safety issues. And the public deserves information about the degree of safety in their communities and about how good a job law enforcement officers are doing to keep them safe.

The state Attorney General's Office needs to ensure that information about crime is compiled quickly, efficiently and accurately, and presented to the public in a timely fashion.