Multivariate analyses, which controlled for a number of structural variables, showed that there was a significant increase in each of the five categories of economic crime -- robbery, burglary, auto theft, grand larceny, and petty larceny -- committed in Chicago during the administration of Chief of Police O.W. Wilson. Previous failure to account for changes in hierarchical control resulted in model specification errors which lessened the analyses' capacity to predict and understand changes in the level of reported economic crime. This failure could also lead to omitted variable bias, specifically to a tendency to overemphasize the impact of long-term changes in the racial composition of Chicago on the level of reported economic crime.