I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Homicides in Albuquerque spiked last year over 2008 numbers in part due to the discovery of 13 West Mesa victims buried in a mass grave, Albuquerque Police crime data show.
Other than that, violent crime in the city appears to have dropped off from 2008, with reported rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults dipping below the previous year’s numbers, according to the Albuquerque Police Department annual report and other city stats.
In 2009, the state’s largest city recorded 56 homicides compared to 38 in 2008, the data show.
The number of reported rapes in Albuquerque, meanwhile, fell to 326 in 2009, a nearly 12 percent tumble from 2008’s 12-year high of 370 reported rapes, according to government reports.
Property crimes also dropped in 2009, compared to 2008 numbers, with the exception of burglaries. Burglaries rose by 3.8 percent, from 6,137 in 2008 to 6,376 in 2009, reports show.
Albuquerque’s experience, at least when it came to violent crime, appears to have mirrored many other cities across the country with populations over 100,000, according to a preliminary version of the FBI’s annual crime report released on Monday.
Dozens of cities reported a reduction in violent crime, the report shows. That matched up with the overall crime picture nationwide. Overall, the FBI report showed that violent crimes across the country declined by 5.5 percent in 2009 while property crimes decreased 4.9 percent despite the economic hardship and high unemployment, the New York Times reported.
If you’re combing the FBI report for data on Albuquerque, however, don’t spend too much time. The state’s largest city is nowhere to be found, and there’s a reason for that.
Albuquerque missed the Feb. 12 deadline for providing the needed information for the FBI’s Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report, January through December, 2009,” according to the Criminal Justice Information Service division (CJIS) of the FBI.
“Albuquerque, NM, did not provide 12 months of complete data prior to publication deadlines for the Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report, January through December, 2009,” the CJIS told the Independent earlier this week.
“I don’t know what happened,” said T.J. Wilham, Albuquerque’s Public safety communications director.
The FBI relies on voluntary reporting from thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country. It is interesting to note that much smaller cities than Albuquerque submitted the necessary information on time, such as Billings, Montana, population 105,427; Manchester, N.H., population 108,671; and Paterson, N.J., population 144,943.
Wilham said the city has since sent the needed information in. So we’ll have to wait to see how Albuquerque compares when the final annual crime report comes out in September.
