gaithersblog.net

I’ve been attempting to understand a bit more about the crime statistics, and how they fit as compared to other jurisdictions. One helpful resource that I found is the FBI’s Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, which is now available in preliminary form for 2006 year-end .

I’ve pulled in their spreadsheet and have included data for Montgomery County, District 6 and Gaithersburg in order to do some comparisons. I should caution that the FBI’s data only includes jurisdictions with with more than 100,000 population, so it it isn’t a perfect peer group for Gaithersburg. Also, while District 6 and Montgomery County taken as a whole each do have populations more than 100,000, they may be lacking the municipal character of most of the jurisdictions in the FBI report. Still, this data does give a reasonably good idea of how much crime is typical for an urban region.

As is the case with the MCP and Gaithersburg Police data, what is provided is absolute counts of crime incidents. All of these jurisdictions report their crime data according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting methodology, for which there are extensive and detailed instructions. Thus the numbers should be directly comparable. But since the jurisdictions are of widely-varying sizes, it is not really possible to directly compare a count of, say, burglaries in New York City to burglaries in Gaithersburg — of course New York’s number will be vastly larger. This is why I divided all the incident counts by the population of each jurisdiction, so that I could look at per capita crime rates.

After computing this figure for all 241 jurisdictions in the FBI report, I wanted to get a figure that indicated where our local jurisdictions would fall in the list, had they been included. Toward this end, I counted the number of jurisdictions which had lower per capita incidence rates than Gaithersburg, divided that count by the total number of jurisdictions, and expressed the result as a percentage. This gives a percentile rank — the higher this number, the worse the crime rate in a relative sense. These numbers are presented in a table below for Gaithersburg, all of District 6 and for all of Montgomery County.

By and large, the Gaithersburg numbers, on a per capita basis, are sort of on the high side of the middle of the pack, although robberies are pretty high at 78%. However, there is one category for which the Gaithersburg numbers just jump out and smack you in the face: Larceny. (Larceny is basically theft of property other than vehicles, except by burglary or robbery.) In 2006, Gaithersburg had about 31.9 larcenies per thousand residents. The *only* jurisdiction in the FBI report with a higher rate of larcenies is St. Louis, MO. Taking the aggregate “Property Crimes” number, which includes just Larceny, Burglary and Auto Theft, Gaithersburg’s rate is higher than all but four other listed jurisdictions: Tacoma, WA, Orlando, FL, Fayetteville, NC and St. Louis, MO. This is despite the fact that Gaithersburg’s Burglary and Auto Theft figures are just sort of mid-pack.

Thus, my primary conclusion after looking at these numbers is that there is a lot of thievery in Gaithersburg. I will note that a large amount of this theft is from vehicles, which has been very common for some time now. In fact, week after week in the District 6 crime reports the police remark on the extremely high rate of these sorts of thefts. And a disturbingly high number of these thefts are from unlocked vehicles. A lot of people in Gaithersburg are leaving valuables in their cars and leaving them unlocked, and there are a lot of people out there who are taking advantage of this fact.