Being a freelance reporter in Alamogordo, I am interested in finding out what’s going on in the community.  I was reading the City of Alamogordo’s Annual Report for 2007 yesterday and couldn’t help but notice some sloppiness in the report.  The City wanted to portray Alamogordo as a favorable city to live and quoted some statistics about the property crime rates and violent crime rates.  As you can see from the attached report, page 4 listed two histograms.  There are quite a few problems with these graphs:

1. From the statistics point of view, bar charts should be used instead of histograms.  Histograms are used for continuous data to indicate frequencies of a range of values.  In this graph, each city is a distinct category, so a bar chart should be used.
2. There are no texts to describe or explain the graphs.  I have no idea why those are inserted except for the purpose to impress the public that Alamogordo seems to have low crime rates.  It may be true, but that needs to be elaborated.
3. Since there is no description of the graphs, it is unclear of the definition of property crime rates and violent crime rates.  Please do not expect the public to look up those definitions and how the data are categorized.
4. There are also no sources for these data.  It only says “the charts above display the latest FBI collected statistics for New Mexico communities.”  Are they the latest figures in 2008, 2007 or 2006?  I assume the numbers on the y-axis are the numbers for cases of those crimes?  Is it relative to the population?  If it’s not, the graphs are even more misleading because Roswell and Las Cruces are much bigger towns with bigger population than Alamogordo.  I was just so curious about the figures and did a casual search on the FBI website, but couldn’t locate those information.  I could only find by State or areas, but could not find the exact cities as listed there.  The City might have gotten the information directly from FBI or somewhere else, but it would be nice to cite the source so we know the data are credible.

It is a good idea if graphs or tables can add to the meaning of the report.  If they arouse the suspicion of the discerning readers, then other content on the report will also become questionable.