(A.K.A. How to lie with statistics)
Crime rates are, in fact, down in Eastwood.
If you follow this link, you’ll get to the Syracuse Police Department’s Neighborhood Statistics page, where you’ll find crime statistics broken down by TNT neighborhood. I opened up Eastwood’s, of course, and was rather taken by what I saw. By gum, crime has generally come down since this blog went active. Here’s the condensed version:
I just kind of tabulated how many points it went up, down, up, down… and overall, how far down it went up or down during the period of July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2009. Generally speaking, it’s looking pretty good.
Now I would just love to take credit for that. After all, this blog and its comments and email group have facilitated a certain amount of community-wide sharing of ideas, reminded us of how we all think a tad differently from each other from time to time (okay, really differently sometimes, but diversity of opinion is a good thing…) and we might conclude that, during this time of getting to know each other better, crime has in fact gone down.
But I’m not so sure that we can say that one is a cause of the other.
On the other hand, neither can we say that Walkable Eastwood – the opinions of its blogger and the discussions going on in its email group - is the cause of the crimes that did take place. Frankly, I’d like to lay that one squarely on the shoulders of the perpetrators.
So in the meantime, let’s thank our local police officers for all their hard work, and let’s thank the unnamed individuals who talk with each other, keep their eyes on the street, and actually call the police when they see something amiss. You, our neighbors, are helping them to do their job. And maybe those statistics are encouraging, at least in part, because of you.
Wow! That’s wonderful!