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| Crime rates and PR: an ode to Baltimore |
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05 November 06.
I live in Baltimore. OK, so what was the first image that came to your head when you read that? For most folks, the associations with the word Baltimore are either crime, poverty, or general blight. Maybe you got that impression from a TV show like The Wire, or from a TV show like Homicide: Life on the Streets, or even from a pop song like Baltimore by Randy Newman, or a pop song like Baltimore by Lyle Lovett. I recall everybody's reaction at my high school when I got accepted to the University of Chicago: “Y'know, it's cold there.” I got that line maybe twenty times. Yes, it does get cold there. But what these people didn't realize is that half the year, Chicago is obnoxiously hot. I suppose it's no real surprise that when I tell people I live in Baltimore, they assume I'm shot at every day. But they fail to realize that half the town is kinda nice. The Borders & Noble just opened four blocks from my house, bringing with it the eighth Starbuck's in the city, and an exceptional stats shelf. And if that's too pricey and megacorp for ya, the Book Thing is two blocks away. But nobody says to me `Oh, you're from Baltimore? That's the city that reads!' How do these stereotypes develop? How does a city get summarized into a verbal postcard that nobody bothers to think about anymore? More importantly, how do we get those stereotypes changed?
Detroit: Capital of the Rust Belt
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Baltimore: Stab wound or gun wound?
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San Francisco: Everybody's gay!!
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Seattle: Kurt Cobain drank coffee here
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By the FBI's data, Baltimore
had 11,248 violent crimes per person and a population of 641,097,
for a violent crime rate of 1.75%. But the great majority of crimes
are property crimes like larceny from vehicle (aka `stealing from
somebody's car'), which is not the sort of thing that keeps people up at
night. There were 269 murders and 162 rapes in Baltimore in 2005, giving
us a rate of 41.96 homicides per 100,000 and 25.27 rapes per 100,000.
Now let's look at a few other haphazard cities:
First, GSS's point is well-supported by the table: the variance in crime
rates, by any of the above measures, is gigantic.
Also different types of crime
vary differently. San Diego's murder rate is almost a tenth Baltimore's,
but the rape rate is slightly higher. The murder rate generally
follows the overall crime rate better, but is not a particularly
close proxy. Among the top 100 cities by population, the correlation
is 72%. Correlation between rape and overall crime among the top 100: 49%; rape/murder correlation: 31%.
Part of the problem is that we're talking about events per 100,000. With
72 rapes in Salt Lake City in 2005, the city beat out Baltimore
on that scale-but what does that say about the odds that any one
person will be raped in either city? If there had been 26 fewer rapes in
SLC, then the rankings would be reversed.
Then there are aggregation problems.
There are parts of Baltimore where I would not dare to tread. But the
same could be said of every city in the entire country. The statement
“around here, things go from rich neighborhood to poor neighborhood
in just a block or two” has been made regarding every city I've ever
lived in (which is many). This only makes it more difficult to work out
what exactly the crime rates mean. If we have one city where the crappy
parts are extra-crappy but the city center is average, it will look
worse on the endless stream of Safest City stats
than a city with an average crappy part and an average city
center. But nobody in the city center, walking home from the Borders & Noble, would notice a difference.
LA County did us the favor of fragmenting things into over 80 submunicipalities. For
example, the two highest crime-per-100,000 resident cities
are Vernon, CA (pop: 94, crimes: 48)
and City of Industry, CA (pop: 840, crimes: 140).
Without the endless averaging of high- and low-crime areas you have a clear
picture that that Vernon, CA, which seems to be a one block wide
and five block long stretch just South of LA proper,1is a bad
neighborhood, without all the averaging of good neighborhoods getting
in the way.
The summary: we'd like to read the stats above as a probability, so that
when the FBI says that Detroit has a 2.4% crime rate and New York a 0.7%
rate, that those are your odds of suffering a crime over a year. But
there are too many complications beyond the simple numbers, especially
for the very rare events like murder and rape. What neighborhood you're
in, where you're walking at night, and with whom you're associating will
all have a bigger effect on your odds of being raped or murdered than
where your city ranks on a somewhat arbitrary unidimensional scale.
@ARTICLE{gss:crime,
[link] [3 comments]
Replies: 3 comments
on Monday, November 6th, Miss ALS of San Diego said
hmm. interesting. i imagine every college city has a higher incident of rape than non-college cities (Columbus, SD, etc). But the most interesting factoid (info, not fluff!) of today's blog is clearly the full name of LA, to which I will now happily and confusingly refer to as Nuestra Senora.
on Monday, November 6th, the author said
The FBI has data for you on that question too: have a look at the crime by college campus table.
on Monday, November 6th, Miss ALS of San Diego said
Not really--that's just a comparison of college cities; there's no 'sister city' situation with a non-college city (I mean big university here--almost all cities have some college)...so, Pasadena vs. Santa Monica, or Columbus v. Cincinnati...
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