Halloween, Crime, and Georgetown

Photo by VKKV.

At the ANC meeting Monday night, Ed Solomon reported that Georgetown is experiencing a crime spike. GM’s crunched the numbers recently and concluded for himself that, yes, crime did tick up in the third quarter. But he was curious to know whether there’s a particular spike in crime in and around Halloween. So he went back and recrunched the numbers, this time he looked at crime on Halloween weekend (for the sake of clarity he chose the weekend before Halloween when it fell on a Mon-Wed, and the weekend after if it fell on a Thursday or Friday; in either case he looked at Fri-Sun for the numbers). Looking back to 2006, this is what he found out:

Crime has been very consistent in Georgetown for Halloween weekend (dare GM call it eerie?) The total number of crimes barely budges year to year, and averages 12.6. Unsurprisingly thefts lead the way, averaging 8.4, while thefts from auto trail far behind second with an average of 2.2. Robberies have been spotty, but burglaries have been been steady over the past three years.

But what about just Halloween itself? Here’s what those numbers are:

Crime for Halloween itself is roughly in line with Halloween weekend, although thefts and car break-ins are much lower.

But that still leaves the question of whether this is out of the norm for Georgetown crime. So GM went back yet again and crunched the numbers to find out what the average is for crime in Georgetown on weekdays and weekends since 2006. The results are rather interesting.

Here’s the averages for the weekdays:

And here’s the averages for the weekend days:

Total Halloween crime is nearly double the average crime, regardless of whether it falls on a weekend or a weekday (GM should point out that these are average numbers for the whole year. It could be that crime drops so much in other months that the spike in Halloween crime is seasonal rather than having to do with the day itself.) (GM should also point out that all of these numbers are pretty small, so there could be a large margin of error, which could pretty much eliminate the entire usefulness of this data, but GM’s not nearly skilled enough in statistics to make that determination.)

There are some interesting points in the categories though. Burglaries happen a lot more on Halloween, which could make sense since people are opening and closing their doors a lot on Halloween and might be susceptible to a coordinated burglary. Robberies, however, are much lower, which may result from the presence of so many cops manning the corners.

But all the Halloween questions aside, GM was simply fascinated with the averages themselves. Look at how they differ:

Crime itself actually goes down on weekends, which surprised GM. A decline in thefts explains a lot of that, but interestingly burglaries go way down on weekends also. That makes sense since a lot of burglaries happen during the workday when most houses are empty.

The final upshot GM takes from all of this is that we are really looking at low numbers here. It’s not Mayberry, but there are plenty of neighborhoods a lot worse off than Georgetown, so for that we should be thankful.