January 22, 2008
Major violent and property crimes down in Roanoke
The briefing of Roanoke City Council on crime statistics proved to be a summary report on crime trends in the city, which showed a substantial decrease in Part I offenses -- basically major crimes against people and property, and the same crimes listed on our crime maps.
Here is one of the charts council was shown:
Comments
[January 22, 2008 8:23 PM]
Valerie : →http://savecountryside.blogspot.com/OK, I stayed awake and played the webcast.
Mentioned the quadrants and zone policing but no breakdown of crimes per quadrant. Not that I expected it. I've had no luck in getting Zone 4 statistics. My comment to the Zone 4 Captain must not have set too well that "I was getting the runaround".
Alot of politicing on the dais - inappropriate passing out of campaign material at the MLK Banquet too.
[January 23, 2008 12:51 PM]
Ed S.Unfortunately, statistics (especially when they involve politics, such as keeping the police commissioner's job or more money for the department in this example), are usually useless. These numbers may be fairly accurate, but as Valerie noted (and Matt many times before), the loss of quadrants makes the data less useful.
Consider the case of Washington, DC. A friend used to work for MPD (Metropolitan Police Dept). They have several Police Service Areas (PSAs) that the city is broken into. Each PSA has a certain number of officers assigned. The Dept received complaints that there weren't enough officers to cover the PSAs. Solution? Redraw the lines to make fewer (but larger) PSAs. Results? Same number of officers, but now the city/dept could boast "8 officers per PSA instead of 5" (numbers for example only).