Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
Could it be that crime incidents in the downtown area are just rising due to the explosion in population? Anybody got any per capita stats for downtown area neighborhoods?
I’m downtown as I write this and it feels as safe as it always has been. Of course, there are plenty of people waking around.
|
It utterly depends on what type of crime you're even talking about. Some are up, but overall crime
is actually statistically down in almost every corner of the city. I think downtown doesn't have a major decrease in crime count, but the rate is lower due to an exploding population. Some of the biggest decreases in some of the more violent crimes except for shootings and murder are actually in the highest crime areas.
This is true though all across the US in that everyone thinks violent crime is up when in large part it's down - but for some reason shootings and murders are up almost everywhere. However, i think the fact that we get news about literally everything right away makes people believe that most violent crime is up when it's actually down. Nate Silver last year did a little study on this and found that people are generally really terrible at assessing their risk of being the victim of a crime. Somehow though they're really good at determining their chances of losing their job though.
This is the total of any assault, battery, or robbery for each year up until 9/9 for Near North Side, The Loop, and Near South Side combined. Not counting NWS in this right now..
2002: 2593 reported incidents
2003: 3875
2004: 3769
2005: 3505
2006: 3431
2007: 3354
2008: 3227
2009: 2749
2010: 2729
2011: 2376
2012: 2430
2013: 2227
2014: 2191
2015: 2205
2016: 2646
2017: 3092
2018: 3343
2019: 3442
2020: 2289
2021: 2677
So far in 2021 in these areas, it's about the same as in 2016, but 2017 thru 2019 really surged and each are a bit higher than 2021. I think 2020 was probably down due to lock downs and all that. From a per 100K rate perspective, you have 2010 at 2762.14 per 100K while 2021 is at 1516.08 per 100K. Rate wise that's a pretty significant reduction even though the overall number of incidents isn't much lower.
Now let's look at the incidents above involving a gun:
2002: 163
2003: 211
2004: 183
2005: 169
2006: 131
2007: 153
2008: 126
2009: 138
2010: 97
2011: 74
2012: 84
2013: 55
2014: 67
2015: 97
2016: 148
2017: 149
2018: 169
2019: 147
2020: 135
2021: 211
There is an uptick in assaults, robberies, and batteries with a gun and it was the same level as 2003. Keep in mind that these 3 areas in 2020 have 77,774 more people than in 2010. Per 100K rate of this in 2010 was 98.18 while in 2021 (using 2020 populations) is 119.49.