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 […]

February 1, 2010; 4:54 PM • by North Richmond News

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

Robberies for the last dozen or so months

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.