Four Years of Previous Sheriff Fletcher AWOL on Clearing Cases

Steve Scholl challenged me to provide the last ten years of performance data of the previous sheriff to compare to the new Ramsey County Sheriff Matt Bostrom.

"If the point is that the former sheriff was below normal in clearing cases, making arrests, and otherwise the worst sheriff in the area, support it with all the facts, not just a few selective ones.The former sheriff was in office for a long time.  Let's see his numbers year by year."

The graph below shows last ten years for comparison. Below the fold is all the detail on how these numbers are retrieved and calculated.

A clearance rate is the percentage of successful resolutions of crime investigations. A successful resolution can mean an arrest or it can mean clearing everyone of wrong doing. You should compare these numbers to the green line of state wide average clearance rates which slowly rose from 43% to 50% in the same time period.

The law requires law enforcement agencies to report this data completely and accurately.

Note that there are four years from 2006 until 2009 where basically Sheriff Fletcher reported that his Sheriff's office cleared almost no cases of crime. In all possible comparisons, these numbers stand out. What happened - did everyone go on vacation for four years? I think it is a reasonable theory that Sheriff Fletcher and his office stopped doing the business of Ramsey County Sheriff and instead went on witch hunts for terrorists associated with the Republican National Convention. I think someone in mass media, who stills claims the title of journalist, should ask Bob Fletcher to explain those numbers.
This is just calculation notes for people who want to check out my numbers. There is no additional information for the story.

It is most important to understand that one cannot take ALL of the Ramsey county numbers because it would include many municipalities that Sheriff does not police. The Sheriff only directly polices in seven municipalities: Arden Hills, Little Canada, North Oaks, Shoreview, Vadnais Heights, White Bear Township and Gem Lake. I assume that all these municipalities were policed by the Sheriff's office for the last 11 years. If that assumption is incorrect, then those years will have be recalculated.

The Sheriff's office also polices waterways, courts and the jail which can also generate cases which is probably captured in the Ramsey Sheriff line.

The BCA reports do not have one number ready to be used. So I have to calculate the total Sheriff clearance rate by getting the total number of Sheriff cases, by adding the Ramsey County Sheriff line to the municipalities  of Arden Hills, Little Canada, North Oaks, Shoreview, Vadnais Heights, White Bear Township and Gem Lake. The data comes from the Table 38 O line. I use the same process on the cleared cases, from Table 38 C line. For the clearance rate, divide the cases cleared by total cases and convert to a percentage. You can check my work on a worksheet here.

Every year of BCA reports has a different PDF of reports to download, open and check. So 11 years is 11 PDFs downloaded.

The statewide averages come from Table 10 of the BCA reports.

The data used to generate the graph is here:

This article is the follow up to checking out Sheriff Bostrom performance numbers and checking out Sheriff Fletcher's performance numbers.