Attempted residential burglaries booked as lesser crimes?

This article deals with a bit of a gray area in crime reporting in DPD. This is an important issue because RPD does the same thing, and we should probably think about what it means.

The RPD position is that in some cases the burglary cannot be proven but a lesser charge of criminal mischief or vandalism can be. This seems to be a reasonable position, although I think maybe the prosecutor should be making that call. Maybe the prosecutor[s] have already given a rule-of-thumb to the RPD which they follow. I don't know.

Hardboiled cynics might say that this downgrading is intentional because it makes the crime stats look better. I am not quite that cynical yet.

But the take-away is this: when you see crime stats for criminal mischief or vandalism consider the possibility that this was an attempted burglary that was written up as a lesser offense. I know I am a broken record on this, but if you want to know why the LEO was called in the first place you're going to have to listen to the scanner traffic. It's not a perfect solution but it's better than the alternatives.