With all the talk of downgrading crime statistics and officers not taking reports, my colleague Justin Fenton stumbled on a new twist -- in Memphis, people are complaining that their police department is too good at recording crime, making the city look worse than people think it really is (at left, a shooting scene on Fayette Street captured by Sun photographer Elizabeth Malby).

In Baltimore, we have the exact opposite problem -- people think the cops are hiding crime and that the city is actually worse than police say it is. See previous articles on the nanny in Bolton Hill who was attacked but recorded as a "police information," which led to the ouster of a district police commander.

According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, their police count just about everything, including thefts under $1,000 in value, which the New York Police Department doesn't. Different standards across the country, despite the FBI's attempt to make all crime reporting uniform, makes all these charts we see rating cities difficult. It's one of the reasons we fall back on the homicide count; it's generally believed that is the most accurate, even if it's one of the least effective ways to measure whether a city is safe.

We of course saw that even murder numbers can be problematic when Detroit under-reported its number to the FBI, putting them ahead of Baltimore for the number one slot in the homicide rate for 2008.

The newspaper article singled out Baltimore:

Other discrepancies surface in cases where several crimes are committed in one incident. While Memphis reports each individual crime, some cities report only the highest offenses -- such as murder.

Baltimore, for example, had 100 more murders than Memphis, yet inexplicably had a lower rate of violent crime.

With a population of 634,549, Baltimore reported 234 murders and 10,080 violent crimes, according to preliminary FBI numbers for 2008. Memphis, with a population of 672,046, had 137 murders, but 12,927 violent crimes.

To me, it doesn't make much sense to count a single incident several times. If someone is robbed, shot and killed, what is it? A robbery, a shooting or a homicide. Can it be all three? And if you count it as three separate crimes, does that make that incident worse than it really is? After all, it's one crime, not three. I would count it as a homicide for statistical purposes but also keep track of motive and means (robbery and shooting).

It's never easy and people will always think the numbers are somehow manipulated.