This letter is responding to The News Tribune story published at chronline.com April 24 titled “Study: Washington ranked among the most dangerous states in the country.”
It was negligent to publish this story.
The study by the Simmrin Law Group, was done by using public data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, assigning an arbitrary score to each type of crime and ranking states against each other based on that score. Then, to pad out their study, they write very brief and very broad observations on the “10 Safest States” and the “10 Most Dangerous States.”
The FBI repeatedly, throughout their website says not to use UCR data to rank locales against each other, the data only reflects crimes known to local police agencies, and they are claiming more thefts in our state means we’re more dangerous.
The Simmrin Law Group is a law firm out of California. They’re not researchers. They’re lawyers writing a long blog post on their website.
The story published on The Chronicle’s website takes all of their study at face value without any skepticism and very minimal reporting.
At best, publishing this study will reaffirm people's belief on the safety of our state.
At worst that story, along with all of the writing devoted to just republishing crime reports and trial sentencing without any other context or reporting, will convince people to be unreasonably afraid of their community.
Brian Fullerton
Centralia
