On to the Goal

I hate to come off a week’s absence with another story about lawbreakin’. I really do. But as suspected, the story isn’t going away. Thankfully, however, we now have the facts, and unlike a variety of media reports you’re about to see, we know how to use them.

First, major kudos to Jeremy Fowler of the Orlando Sentinel for succeeding where I failed and finally providing us with a complete accounting of all 24 “arrests.” It turns out the actual number of players arrested is 19, with four former Gators being responsible for multiple incidents. My list missed the following players, not counting Janoris Jenkins who was arrested subsequent to the initial publication:

• Riley Cooper: Misdemeanor obstruction for failing to get out of the way of a moving police or fire vehicle. Charges dropped.
• Louis Murphy: Misdemeanor weed possession. Charges dropped. (Totally forgot about that.)
• Jon Demps: Misdemeanor driving with a suspended license. Charges dropped. Demps was booted for undisclosed, drug-rumor-y reasons, but his arrest was minor.
• Dawayne Grace: Two incidents involving battery, disorderly conduct and the always dreadful “violation of a city ordinance.” Meyer suspended him indefinitely after the second incident and he transferred.

Without knowing more about the Dawayne Grace situation (could go either way) none of those exactly fall into the “depraved” category. The truly heinous incidents, it seems, belong to just four players: Ronnie Wilson, Jamar Hornsby, Jacques Rickerson and Avery Atkins. Does that warrant a pat on the back? Something like, “Hey, you guys only committed one fucked up crime this year, great job!” No, it does not. But it’s worth noting.

Overall, we’re left with this: 19 players racked up 24 “arrests” in four years. That’s bad. But how bad? Fowler’s Sentinel colleague Andrea Addelson has an opinion: It’s a ssuper-suhrious problem:

Let’s put these numbers into context. The arrest rate for the football team going back to Meyer’s first season in 2005 is roughly 10 percent (24 arrests out of 239 players listed on the official roster).

Compare these numbers to the general population. In 2004, the last year statistics are available, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the Department of Justice reported the arrest rate in the United States to be 4.7 percent (4,752.4 arrests per 100,000 residents).

But, oh, how that analysis is flawed. First, the actual Gators arrest rate is just shy of 8 percent (19 of 239 players), but we’ll give that one a pass since everyone was initially confused about this.

UPDATE: With apologies to Adelson, I went overboard on that point. The overall arrest rate for males 15-24 obviously is likely to include many individuals who have been arrested multiple times. Thus, 24 arrests from 239 individuals is the most fair number to use here. Mea culpa. The overall point still holds, however.

Second, complete crime statistics are available for a year as recent as 2007. Really, it’s right there on the FBI Web site, which is the first result in a Google search for “Uniform Crime Reporting.”

But most importantly, she uses the overall arrest rate in her analysis, which would be fine if we were dealing with a population sample that was representative of the overall demographic makeup of the United States. We’re not. We’re dealing with individuals who are, relatively speaking, far more likely to commit crimes: Young males. As such, we shouldn’t look at a number (the overall rate) that incorporates grandmothers and infants.

It’s hard to find data for the age range typical of college football teams, namely 18-22. But we can get close by comparing U.S. Census estimates and crime data for males aged 15-24. In July of 2007, there were an estimated 21, 800, 163 15-24-year-old males living in the U.S. That’s about 7.23 percent of the total population.

Of the 14-plus million arrests made in 2007, more than 3.2 million involved males aged 15-24. That tells us three things:

1. Young males make up 7.23 percent of the nation but are responsible for 22.8 percent of its crimes.
2. The arrest rate for those young males is actually 14.8 percent.
3. Young males are stupid.

So Florida players get arrested at a LOWER rate than their peers, which isn’t surprising considering the discipline and structure inherent to almost any football program. In general, sports teams and their coaches tend to keep otherwise wayward souls on a straight path. I don’t think the Florida Gators and Urban Meyer are any exception.

The flip side of this, of course, is that Meyer has control over whom he lets into the program — this isn’t a neighborhood Boys & Girls Club team. On at least a few instances, he apparently chose poorly. The fact that some of his players occasionally smoke weed or get into bar fights should be neither surprising nor a cause for alarm. But several incidents involving domestic battery and AK-47s in a short amount of time should and will raise red flags.

We could take that in a million different directions, but I’ll be more succinct: There’s absolutely cause for some introspection here. But when Outside The Lines, Yahoo Sports or whoever inevitably comes knocking, don’t let them tell you that Florida is some kind of a haven for criminals relative to the rest of society. The facts simply don’t support that conclusion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Law & Order. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.