RPD announces Robbery initiative
The RPD recently announced they just completed an initiative to reduce the number of robberies in and around our neighborhood:
The Initiative resulted in robberies in those areas being cut by more than half. In Sector 313, which includes the Fan area, robberies dropped from 13 to 5. In Sector 412, which includes the Carver, Ginter Park and Barton Heights, robberies decreased from 14 to 3. In Sector 413, which includes Jackson Ward, City Center and VCU, robberies were reduced from 14 to 6. All of this during a three-month period from September to November.
I emailed the police to clarify the dates involved, they responded “the robbery statistics were from Sept. 22 through Nov. 18 and then compared with Nov. 18 through Dec. 22.”
I wanted clarification because it didn’t really jibe with my (admittedly arbitrary) feeling of how the number of robberies has progressed this year.
So, I pulled the data for robberies in the 4th precinct for the last dozen or so months using the RPD’s incident reporting system.
Number of robberies in the 4th precinct from December ‘08 to January ‘10
A couple of things to note: 1) this is the entire 4th precinct not the specific sectors targeted by the police, and 2) this is all robberies (residential / commercial) not just individual robberies.
You can see that the number of robberies in December did drop to about half of October’s numbers, so that is good. But this isn’t unheard of — look at last February’s numbers.
Also, December’s low numbers are almost within one standard deviation (5.41) from the mean (21.75). So, the drop isn’t some crazy outlier.
On Jan 28th, someone was robbed at gun point around 2910 Montrose Ave. 6:57 p.m. Right when people are still getting home from working. This block is near W Brookland Park Blvd, near the R&S Grocery Store, 402 W Brookland Park Blvd. This store has been a gathering place for neg element in the area.
I have to say this is one of the things I find so amusing about when the local cops come to community meetings and say, “look, crime is down, yeah!” when they’re talking about a reduction from say 20 to 15 robberies in the area. They might say, “hey look, we had a 25% reduction in robberies”. Well yes we did by the number of incidents is so small that couching it in percentage terms is obscuring rather than illuminating the matter. All of the crime numbers at the neighborhood or even precinct level are often so small when broken down by type that any kind of statistical comparison is rather pointless. The standard deviation can often be greater than the mean. This goes for the “horror” of an increase in crime as well. When the local rags or local TV crime report snoops around and says “Oh my gosh, there’s been a 25% increase in robbery (or whatever) in such and such neighborhood. Police promise action. Neighbors are up in arms!” it is really just pointless ruffling of feathers to sell papers and gin up ratings. I’m not trying to downplay the significance of crime in our neighborhoods here, I’m just trying to make the point that we need not be so focused on a certain % decrease of increase in crime. We need to be focused on making this a safer community in general. That requires a lot of effort on our part and the part of the police.