urbanSTL

gary kreie wrote:Could it be that the "cities" list is biased against rustbelt metro areas where the "city" happens to represent a small inner core of the surrounding metro area? It would be more accurate for statisticians to normalize out the contaminating effects of cities' wildy varying city limit extensions into surrounding low crime suburbs. But that takes work, and the statisticians get lazy when the data isn't pre-collected, pre-normalized, and handed to them on a silver platter. City limits are a complete hodgepodge which, if not normalized correctly and consistently, completely destroy any meaning behind danger rankings. But the press loves that most flawed version of the rankings the most -- probably because the biggest cities look safer, or are not included at all.

That seems like a plausible, reasonable explanation. However, San Francisco has 830K people in 47 square miles and Boston has 646K residents in 48 square miles, and both cities have much lower per capita violent crime rates than Saint Louis.

Look at the amount of poverty and the poverty dispersal (or lack thereof) of those cities vs. St. Louis. There's large part of your answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/201 ... verty-map/

^ Thanks for posting that link, as it really says it all in my opinion. Concentrated poverty is at the root of the high violent crime, racial tension, and many other social problems in our area.

Ok... so I did my own analysis of the crime stats up to Oct 2014:
http://www.slmpd.org/Crimereports.shtml

I did a couple view points
- Homicides
- Burglary
- Aggr Assault

I then looked at it from 1/1/2013 through 10/31/2014 and did 2 or 3 main graphs:
1. Time Series by Month Total
2. Rolling 90 day Sum Control Chart which should help us see any "trends"


Overall:
1. Yes Homicides are drastically up and it shows no sign of slowing down.
2. Aggr Assault and Burglary are in fact down, however we have not yet seen the "Winter Weather" Dip for burglary which usually occurs in Oct. This is slightly worrisome because a some of Oct Data does not actually get reported until November. (Think crimes that occurred on Oct 29-31 and it was never entered into the system until Nov) It also coincides with all the NextDoor.com chatter about break ins as well as the STLToday.com articles about the community meetings to discuss.

Here are some simple graphs:


You can see below that our rolling 90 average has never been this higher before (over past 18 months)


Now when we look at Aggr Assault It is pretty clear it is lower than last year


And our 90 average:


When we look at Burglary:


And this was my concern I mentioned above where we have not seen that winter cold drop, but of course realistically we wont know for sure until maybe December's numbers come in.

onecity wrote:Was there an uptick in homicide victims that are not involved in some sort of gang activity? Or is the increase in homicides attributable to criminals offing one another? Data?

I think a felon shooting a felon is still accounting for 90% of the shootings.

threeonefour wrote:

gary kreie wrote:Could it be that the "cities" list is biased against rustbelt metro areas where the "city" happens to represent a small inner core of the surrounding metro area? It would be more accurate for statisticians to normalize out the contaminating effects of cities' wildy varying city limit extensions into surrounding low crime suburbs. But that takes work, and the statisticians get lazy when the data isn't pre-collected, pre-normalized, and handed to them on a silver platter. City limits are a complete hodgepodge which, if not normalized correctly and consistently, completely destroy any meaning behind danger rankings. But the press loves that most flawed version of the rankings the most -- probably because the biggest cities look safer, or are not included at all.

That seems like a plausible, reasonable explanation. However, San Francisco has 830K people in 47 square miles and Boston has 646K residents in 48 square miles, and both cities have much lower per capita violent crime rates than Saint Louis.

San Francisco is unique because that sloped peninsula offers unparallelled views of oceans and mountains. Their metro area ranks worse than ours for crime rate. When you go from inner city SF to the suburbs, your really do go to a more dangerous place, unlike San Antonio where that "effect" is just an artifact of the goofy city ranking methodology. Boston city limits has more crime than their suburbs, but their whole metro area has lower crime including the city, possibly because half the town becomes private college students for 9 months of the year. Those two metros are not typical of Western or Eastern metros respectively.

zink wrote: Overall:
1. Yes Homicides are drastically up and it shows no sign of slowing down.

drastically up from 2013 or from previous years? based on your plot i wouldn't say they're drastically up from last year, at least. the year-long averages look about the same. i'm also not sure you can infer that there's "no sign of slowing down" based on this data.

^as stated this is 1/1/2013 through 10/31/14. So you can't do yr vs yr. But we have 4 months in a row with increasing homicides on a rolling 90 day. Ain't slowing down but I would bet based on weather it will.

roger wyoming II wrote:Gary,

I see what you're saying but we need to own up to our unacceptable homicide rate.... Alex Ihnen even seems to be backing away from his "but look at how safe our Metro is" stance of awhile back. If you compare ourselves to cities like Pittsburgh (smaller geographical size than ours), Cincinnati and Cleveland (not too much larger than ours), we all have high poverty rates but we far outpace the others in homicides.... I believe the entirety of Cuyahoga County (which includes Cleveland) has fewer homicides than we have despite higher poverty and a relatively high rate of other crimes. Something is deeply, deeply wrong here.

I agree with you, the murder rate in the city is alarming, and folks won't start moving to the city downtown again until that area can go a couple of years without another brazen random beating or shooting right downtown. I just don't like it when folks move from St. Louis to Oklahoma City, where my sister lives, (Edmond), citing crime as one of the drawbacks of living in our area. Then they learn crime is actually higher there. My sister's suburban home has been burglarized. Not mine. If you look at just the inner 11.4% of the Oklahoma City metro population and compare murders to the inner 11.4% of the St. Louis metro population (St. Louis City), the murder rate is almost identical.

gary kreie wrote:San Francisco is unique because that sloped peninsula offers unparallelled views of oceans and mountains. Their metro area ranks worse than ours for crime rate. When you go from inner city SF to the suburbs, your really do go to a more dangerous place, unlike San Antonio where that "effect" is just an artifact of the goofy city ranking methodology. Boston city limits has more crime than their suburbs, but their whole metro area has lower crime including the city, possibly because half the town becomes private college students for 9 months of the year. Those two metros are not typical of Western or Eastern metros respectively.

I'll concede that these nuances matter, and thus, they make a direct comparison to St. Louis difficult. To use your Oklahoma City comparison, one could draw a circle around the downtown areas of major cities, say a 10 or 15-mile radius, and come up with some interesting results. In Saint Louis, a circle that size would extend outside the city, and while it would include areas in the Metro East and North County with higher crime rates, it would also include inner-ring suburbs in Mid County and South County with much less crime, not unlike the southernmost city neighborhoods, from Boulevard Heights to St. Louis Hills.

I want a tough approach to address the high crime rate in the city, but I hate these rankings because of the absolutely sketchy methodology used in every one of them. It's exactly why the FBI cautions against reading too much into these rankings.

I always find it interesting when people try to use the city being landlocked as an accuse the reasoning for our high crime rate even if the city and county merge how much of a difference would that make if the city itself is still seeing a decent surge in crime particularly homicides? Im not quite sure what the solution is in reducing senseless slayings that go on almost everyday now. Does anyone know when another is plotting a potential murder? likely no but maybe theres a silver lining that we all don't know about maybe the local police will present a different approach in curbing crime. I still wouldn't mind seeing county police enter into city limits to help patrol streets but that will never happen.

TheNewSaintLouis wrote:I still wouldn't mind seeing county police enter into city limits to help patrol streets but that will never happen.

I'd be okay with that or even the Missouri National Guard patrolling hot spots, but given the significant amount of concern over the policing methods used in the first days of the Ferguson unrest, I'm pretty sure that will never happen.

threeonefour wrote:

TheNewSaintLouis wrote:I still wouldn't mind seeing county police enter into city limits to help patrol streets but that will never happen.

I'd be okay with that or even the Missouri National Guard patrolling hot spots, but given the significant amount of concern over the policing methods used in the first days of the Ferguson unrest, I'm pretty sure that will never happen.

Missouri National Guard has no police training - I think having them "patrol" is a very bad idea. Having them provide extra security to protect police stations, hospitals, schools, etc. during times of civil unrest is a good idea.

How many homicides in the County this year now that the burbs are the new ghettos? We know the rate drops significantly if there was a merger but the overall homicide number would go up a decent amount. Enough to climb a few spots on the leaderboard anyway.

south compton wrote:Missouri National Guard has no police training - I think having them "patrol" is a very bad idea. Having them provide extra security to protect police stations, hospitals, schools, etc. during times of civil unrest is a good idea.

Agreed. I was thinking of the extra show of force, although if the National Guard provided relief as you suggested, that would free up more officers to patrol hot spot areas during times of unrest or perhaps even during a crime wave.

"Crime up after Ferguson and more police are needed"

Yes Ferguson has contributed to an increase in crime across the region. Not just downtown.

http://m.stltoday.com/news/local/crime- ... touch=true

downtown2007 wrote:"Crime up after Ferguson and more police are needed"

Yes Ferguson has contributed to an increase in crime across the region. Not just downtown.

http://m.stltoday.com/news/local/crime- ... touch=true

Well, there you have it. As we speculated a month ago the cops are busy doing other things and doing police work is now racist and crime is up.

City folk who would have NEVER thought about arming themselves are doing so because they are pretty much on their own. Thats just more guns around to steal or fall into the wrong hands. What a mess.

At the super-sketchy downtown 7-11 last night at 6:

A 27-year-old was shot to death outside a 7-Eleven in downtown St. Louis Sunday night.

http://www.kmov.com/news/crime/27-year- ... 84251.html