Baltimoremick.com

As part of a recent series of threads on the pigtownsafety Yahoo Group, I decided to aggregate some data from the craptastic BCPD Online Crime Tracking site and put it together in an Excel spreadsheet. For the members of that list–and anyone else who cares–that list is available here: Burglary Statistics - Washington Village.xls.

The spreadsheet gives a rather simple bar graph of the burglary trend in the neighborhood for the last 90 days. I should preface this data with a couple of notes. For one, I am only looking at one police district–the Southern District. Secondly, I am only looking at the criteria of Burglary as defined by the data stewards of this database. Thirdly, there are other districts and neighborhoods that compose Pigtown, and I am certain that I could possibly increase the number of statistics available by widening my scope to capture the larger neighborhood.

One of the things that is quite obvious is that there is no abatement in the pace of burglaries in the area. While data is incomplete for the month of November, we see that August, September, and October of this year are pretty consistent. Again, I would love to get older data to prove the theory I have had all year long, but I think that will be akin to pulling teeth. Nonetheless, for the 90 day period, there are a total of 54 burglaries.

I believe it is a fair assessment to say, however, that this trend is unacceptable. If one does a quick search on one of the tonier neighborhoods served by the same police district for the same period of time, one finds a shockingly low number of crimes in the same category. In my quick example–as I did not want to go through the tedium of copying cells of data–I looked at Federal Hill. For the same period of time that I looked at Pigtown, Federal Hill tallied 7 burglaries.

I will grant you that in some respect, I am comparing apples to oranges when comparing these two neighborhoods. Nonetheless, they are served by the same police district with the same leadership. Hell, both neighborhoods share ZIP codes. I realize Pigtown is not the only neighborhood to exhibit this kind of problem, but it is the same kind of problem that is being ignored or unheard in civic leadership circles, and until it is heard little progress is going to be made in changing the quality of life in certain neighborhoods in this city.