Mobile’s police chief is slamming a report by Forbes that names Mobile and Birmingham two of the “most dangerous” cities in the U.S. for 2023.

Chief Paul Prine is also pointing to inflated crime data utilized by the website, MoneyGeek, to assess Mobile’s crime taken from the FBI’s relatively new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

He said his concerns are so much that has had his agency reaching out to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) to inquire on how the state is submitting Mobile’s crime data to the FBI. Mobile’s newest crime statistics for 2022, are expected to be released in the coming weeks.

“Suffice to say we are trying to get clarity on how numbers are reported to the state and FBI,” said Prine.

He said the NIBRS system, released last year, is unlike the FBI’s old Summary Reporting System (SRS), in that it can count multiple crimes occurring during one offense. For instance, if someone shoots and kills someone, steals a car, and assaults a witness, only the most serious criminal offense (murder) would be counted under the SRS system. But under NIBRS, up to 10 crimes can be logged for one offense.

According to MoneyGeek’s analysis — used to determine the most violent cities — 111 homicides occurred in 2021. Mobile police, however, have long reported 51 homicides in 2021.

“The problem is (the FBI, though NIBRS) are overcounting,” Prine said. “It’s overreporting and we knew this would be a problem.”

Societal costs

MoneyGeek, a San Francisco-based personal finance technology company, is sticking by its analysis that shows Mobile the No. 2 most dangerous city, trailing only St. Louis, and Birmingham at No. 3.

The Forbes article, posted Tuesday cites the MoneyGeek study, which uses the FBI’s 2021 crime statistics paired with data from academic research on “societal costs of different types of crime.” The result is a measurement that MoneyGeek’s team says provides a value called the cost of crime per capita.

Mobile’s value is $8,014, which puts it at No. 2 among the 263 cities with populations greater than 100,000 people that MoneyGeek analyzed. Birmingham is No. 3, with a cost of crime per capita value at $7,900.

Two other Alabama cities with populations over 100,000 residents – Huntsville and Montgomery – are not included in the analysis.

Prine blasted the report on Wednesday, calling it “very misleading” and “not credible.” He continued to criticize it Thursday, saying the results were based on “hyperinflated” crime numbers reported to the FBI out of Mobile.

“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so egregious that … it could affect tourism dollars or companies wanting to relocate,” said Prine. “It’s very irresponsible for Forbes and MoneyGeek to do what they did.”

A representative with Forbes did not respond to a request for comment.

Nicholas Zeitlinger, digital public relations manager with MoneyGeek, said the numbers the company used for Mobile were provided by the city to the FBI. He said it’s up to the agency to provide its numbers to the FBI, which then puts out an annual crime report that MoneyGeek utilized for its analysis.

He said the company stands by its “methodology and our study” and points to research from two University of Miami professors and a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver, who produced an economic cost for specific crimes.

“We can all agree some crimes are worse and have a greater cost to society than others,” said Zeitlinger. “This helps cities and folks living in them understand the costs their cities take on when criminal injuries and losses to both life and property occur.”

Doug Milnes, Money Geeks’ chief of data analytics, told Forbes that their cost of crime methodology implements different values based on the severity of the crime. For instance, according to the Forbes piece, MoneyGeek assesses a murder at $9 million, while larceny is estimated at $3,500.

Milnes told Forbes that while people can disagree “on the exact value of a life,” the important part of their research is this: Murder is 2,571 times worse than larceny.

“By aggregating each crime into an easily readable stat based on population, we can make broad comparisons about which are the most dangerous cities in the country,” Milnes told Forbes.

Questioning analysis

Prine said that aside from utilizing what he said were inflated crime stats provided by NIBRS, the other analysis by MoneyGeek is concerning. He criticized the company’s use of 2021 FBI data – the latest crime statistics provided by the federal agency – which he says do not reflect a 2023 crime rate.

Prine said that Mobile police are preparing to release 2022 figures that will illustrate violent crime declining in almost every category from 2021, including a 20% dip in the city’s homicide rate.

“They cite 2021 stats, when the 2022 stats are not completed and say, ‘for 2023, these are the most violent cities,’” Prine said.

Zeitlinger said the FBI’s crime data from 2021 is the “most recent standardized information publicly available” and was utilized as a prime source. In addition, he said, MoneyGeek conducted “individualized research using community crime maps and local law enforcement reports” on crime statistics for cities that didn’t have reported FBI data.

He said MoneyGeek’s analysis of 263 cities is 80% of the 328 cities with a population over 100,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census.

Zeitlinger said the omission of Huntsville and Montgomery was because neither reported crime data to the FBI in 2021, and because they “both happen to fall within the 20% of cities with a population over 100,000 that we weren’t able to capture in our dataset due to incomplete or unavailable data.”

MoneyGeek’s analysis also uses an unclear population count for Mobile. According to supplemental information the company provided to AL.com, the crime stats analyzed for Mobile were based on the city having a population of 242,894 residents. The city’s population, according to the 2020 Census count, is 184,952. It’s population plus its extraterritorial police jurisdiction is 266,954.

Other discrepancies exist. For instance, Mobile is reported to have 485 rapes in 2021, as opposed to 65 reported by Birmingham — or 153% more rapes reportedly occurring in Mobile than in Birmingham.

A Birmingham spokesperson for the city of Birmingham or its police department did not respond to a request for comment.

Prine also criticized MoneyGeek for using the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as one of its sources. Wikipedia utilizes a user-generating entering system that has shown to lead to errors, and is often fact-checked by sources. Zeitlinger said the Wikipedia data was used in gathering a list of mass shootings in the U.S., but that the use of the site did not change the data it applied for assessing Mobile.