I was reading the most recent Columbia City Wiki Newsletter (always available here) and it had a link to an anti-columbia city rant - check it out over on the subaru forums. Basically, some guy complaining that he'll never come back to Columbia City because his car got rifled through while he was eating at La Medusa and he had a GPS stolen. He didn't stop there though:
And I wouldn't be writing this if Columbia City wasn't trying to market itself as the next Ballard. Columbia City is NOT Ballard, Fremont or Wallingford. It is a high crime neighborhood with a few pockets of gentrification.
So this got me to thinking - is Columbia City really that much more crime ridden then Ballard, Freemont, and Wallingford?
Since I'm all in a SPD kind of mood because of the excellent picnic happening tomorrow, I thought I'd dig through the Seattle Police Department's crime statistics for January through to May of 2007 (the latest for which data is available).
The statistics are organized by federal Census tract (map here). I grabbed as much data as I could, but I've generated the pretty graphs for just three stats - non residential burglary, theft (which is what our friend "DOHC Outback" suffered), and auto theft. I then ran the numbers for five different regions, composed of the following census tracts:
- Ballard, census tracts 30, 31, 32, 33, 47
- Columbia City, census tracts 101, 102, 103
- Freemont, census tracts 34, 35, 48, 49
- Wallingford, census tracts 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 54
Let's see how we stack up! First, for non residential burglaries:
It would seem that, in fact, Columbia City is really where you want to be. Aside from a spike in January, Columbia City is consistently lower then the other three neighborhoods. Indeed, Wallingford has consistently more non residential burglaries then Columbia City does.
For theft:
Again, Columbia City is down at the bottom of the charts. This time Freemont is giving us a run for our money, but still, on average across the five months, I'd take Columbia City over any other neighborhood.
And finally auto theft:
What do you know, Columbia City is once again bottom of the heap!
So "DOHC Outback", I agree with you - Columbia City is NOT Ballard, Fremont [sic], or Wallingford. It's in fact quite a bit safer then all three of them when it comes to different forms of theft.
4 comments:
You have it all wrong. Fremont has only 1 e!
Search both google and live and you'll see that "freemont seattle" is corrected to fremont!
Still glad to see you're using xl12 graphs. so much prettier than xl11.
Ahoy Cap'n -
This is a great discussion to have -- thanks for starting it. Have you taken all these SPD disclaimers into account?
The Seattle Police Department cautions against using crime and/or other police data to make decisions/comparisons regarding the safety of an area or the amount of crime. When viewing Crime Statistics the following are things to consider:
The Data in the following pages represents Part I crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, auto theft, and arson) and Part II crimes (all other offenses: criminal mischief, trespassing, etc) that are reported to the Seattle Police Department.
Data provided represents only police services where a report was made and does not include other calls for police service.
This data does not reflect or certify "safe" or "unsafe" areas. When looking at crime statistics it is important to consider geography (business vs. residential), and major institutions that exist within the boundaries (i.e. hospitals, schools, parks, etc.) of the reporting areas.
Data will sometimes reflect where the crime was reported versus where the crime occurred.
Areas with a high volume of foot traffic or that is more densely populated may have more reported crime. This does not necessarily mean more crime occurs there, but that more crime is reported there.
Don't forget normally you compare statistics like this as "per capita", i have a gut feeling the comparison neighborhoods are also more dense than cc. notwithstanding the few new condos/townhomes going up here...
Cool start, CCC. Agreed you have some density issues to factor in here. The analysis we did for Capitol Hill sidesteps the per capita issue by looking at YoY change -- that could be one way to address here or you could dig up estimated populations and ballpark some per capita comparisons.
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