Richmond crime goes down (sort of)

Each year C-Q Press releases a quasi-useless list ranking the nation’s cities by “crime.” This year Richmond moves up twenty spots to 79th (a bigger number is better) out of 400. Each city is judged on six categories of crime: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft.

November 23, 2010; 9:31 AM • by Ross Catrow

Each year C-Q Press releases a quasi-useless list ranking the nation’s cities by “crime.” This year Richmond moved up twenty spots to 79th (a bigger number is better) out of 400. Each city is judged on six categories of crime: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft.

Here’s the data — as sent out by the RPD yesterday:

Crime	’08	’09	Change
Murder	32	39	+7
Rape	55	42	-13
Robbery	779	857	+78
Aggravated Assault	753	730	-5
Burglary	1,751	1,585	-166
Motor Vehicle Theft	768	687	-81
Totals:	4,120	3,940	-180

So while we moved up twenty spots from last year, our total crimes have fallen by 4.37%. However, if you aggregate the numbers by “crimes against people” and “crimes against property” (which, by the way, is how the RPD sends out information in their daily Noteworthy Incidents email) the numbers are slightly different:

• Crimes against people: up 4.18%
• Crimes against property: down 9.81%

So what we really have is a significant* reduction in crimes against property and as small increase in crimes against people.

* I don’t mean statistically significant. If interested, someone else can run the numbers and leave a comment to see if it truly is statistically significant.

November 23, 2010 9:31 AM 0