More on Those Crime Stats

Yesterday GM raised a bit of an alarm over a spike in crime in Georgetown last month. After digging a bit more into the data, GM can present a slightly more nuanced picture. There was an troubling uptick in crime for July, but a main contributing factor for why the comparisons to July 2008 looked so bad is that July 2008 looked so good. Check out the monthly totals of crime incidents from 2008 and and 2009:

The June and July 2009 crime stats are creeping up to the genuine spike we experienced in February, but the large increases over July 2008 are primarily because crime dropped sharply in July 2008.

But what’s the breakdown for each category? See them after the jump:

Robberies are both up sharply this July and were down sharply last year. This contributed to a huge spike between the years.

Burglaries, on the other hand, genuinely spiked this July. They were level last July.

Assaults with a deadly weapon are also ticking up, but are roughly level in totals year-to-date.

This is no surprise to anyone living in the upper-East Village: car break-ins are way up this summer, both in real numbers and versus last year.

And this one is no surprise to Georgetown merchants: thefts are always a constant problem for Georgetown businesses and always represent the largest category of crime in the neighborhood.

Stolen autos are actually down for the year versus last year, which experienced a couple of spikes in February and June.

Conclusion:

The situation is not quite as bad as yesterday’s stats would suggest. Crime is up this summer in several categories, but it’s less severe when looked at with the rest of the year’s numbers as context.

A huge, and unfortunate, caveat is that GM obtained the raw stats from MPD. If they are not reported correctly, which many suspect, these numbers are not accurate either.