Crime 'up' in 3 Utah cities

PROVO — The FBI reported this week that violent crime increased in Utah's three largest cities in 2004 — but the numbers may not paint an accurate picture.

For example, the FBI continues to count Lori Hacking as a missing person, even though Hacking's husband, Mark, confessed to murdering her and has been sentenced to prison.

The initial report that she was missing was coded into the FBI database and couldn't be changed when new facts emerged, Salt Lake City police detective Dwayne Baird said. As a result, the FBI's crime statistics for Salt Lake show one too many missing persons and one too few murders.

"Crime statistics are exact in our reports," Baird said, "but they are an inexact science in national databases."

The FBI's preliminary Uniform Crime Report for 2004 shows an increase in violent crime in Provo (32 percent), Salt Lake City (2.4 percent) and West Valley City (1.5 percent), the only three Utah cities included. Nationally, violent crime decreased by 1.7 percent.

The sharp increase in Provo is because of a 50 percent leap in reports of aggravated assaults. But Provo police officials said they define that crime differently than the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which gathers the statistics used by the FBI.

The FBI report said aggravated assaults in Provo jumped from 2003's total of 62 to 93 last year, but Provo Police Capt. Rick Healey said the increase is due to a computer software upgrade that forced Provo to comply with the BCI's definition of the crime.

The BCI counts any assault that results in a broken bone or other serious injury as an aggravated assault, a BCI spokeswoman said. Provo officials previously reported such crimes as aggravated only if a weapon was used.

"If someone was punched in the nose and the nose broke, we counted it as a simple assault in 2003," Healey said. "In 2004, we had to count a fistfight with a broken nose as an aggravated assault."

That's because a BCI software upgrade no longer accepted Provo's attempts to report a crime as a simple assault if a broken bone was listed.

"We have not noticed an increase in aggravated assaults, even though the statistics show there was," Healey said.

Ironically, Farmers Insurance Group announced this week that the Provo/Orem area ranked eighth among mid-sized American cities on its list of most secure places to live. The ranking included a study of crime statistics, the relative lack of extreme weather or natural disasters and employment statistics.