It doesn't look like a statistically significant difference for Seattle. But look at Spokane! Holy shit!

What @1 said. I'm not a whiz at statistics, but from these data, you can't say ANYTHING about whether crime rates are different, or if this is just the expected variation in the exact numbers of events that occur randomly.

I'm pretty sure 20 per year and 23 per year are NOT different numbers of murders, statistically. You can't say "but, but, but it's 15% higher!" unless you have several years where the murder number is 19, 20, 22 18, 19, 20, 21, 20 and then several years where it is 23, 22, 23, 23, 25, 22, 23, 22. Then *maybe* you could say something was "different" about those time periods.

If there were suddently 43 murders, yeah, maybe you could make something of it. Maybe. If there were 2100 aggravated assaults then 2700 the next year, that might look real, since those big numbers are less prone to large percentage variations from randomness. But this table looks pretty uninteresting to anyone who is not completely innumerate.

@4 just proving that stats can be read many ways and are open to interpretation. Lets stop addressing the statistics and start addressing the issues.

The sample sizes for murder and rape are too small to make any analysis purely by these numbers, unless they are part of a longer data trend. It could mean murder and rape is on the rise; it could also be random deviation, and drop the same amount next year. And does the increase in reported rapes indicate an increase in the crime or an increase in the reporting. Rape is a notoriously underreported crime. If this number were to indicate an increase in reporting, then you could take this as a good indication, not a bad one.

The rest of the crimes with incidences over 1,000 indicate no significant difference. Some are up a small amount; one is down a bit. None change a significant amount, up or down. Again, you might make more of this if you used longer timelines for data.

Can we talk about the protective value of gun ownership for a second? I was just comparing the figures (see table 4 on the FBI's page) for violent crimes in New York and Texas, two states considered the polar opposite of gun ownership law. These are whole-state stats, urban and rural, and both states have a lot of each, so there may be additional room for statistical analysis and interpretation, but based on those whole-state stats:

(I'm only looking at the rates per 100,000 now, not the raw numbers. Texas has twice the population of New York so the raw numbers would naturally be higher.)

New York has slightly less "violent crime." If you remove robbery from the stats, New York has a LOT less violent crime. Less than half the forcible rapes of Texas, fewer homicides, fewer aggravated assaults.

Overall, it rather disproves the "guns make you safer" theory of the anti-gun-control faction. Protection from rape is an oft-cited reason to allow concealed carry. Texans can get a CHL much easier than those New Yorkers living outside New York City, and residents of New York City, nearly half of the state's population, are virtually banned from handgun licensing altogether.

Lest we single out Texas, most states have higher rape stats than NY, with Alaska and South Dakota topping the charts at 5 times the level.

So... the crimes that are now reported via an online form with a disclaimer "Most cases will NOT be investigated." have trended down. Color me shocked. Also notice the odd way that things involving autos have a 3x higher lower limit than regular old theft ?

http://www.seattle.gov/spd/report/defaul…
Which CRIMES CAN I REPORT?

The following crimes usually do not require an in-person police response and can be filed online:
Property Destruction
Identity Theft
Car Prowls (under $1500)
Auto Accessories (under $1500)
Theft of Property (under $500)
Narcotics Activity

@8 I was reading your comment on my phone, with its small display so I couldn't see the entire comment at once. For the first three paragraphs I was trying to guess which Slog commenter wrote it, and what the conclusion was going to be.

Happily I guessed wrong on both.

Two other things happening this morning to add to the mix:

Howard Schultz writes an open letter to gun owners, asking them to please stop their stupid 'open-carry-in-Starbucks' agenda.

PolitiFact finds that Mark Shields was correct when he stated that more Americans have died from gun violence (just since 1968!) than have died in ALL US WARS beginning with the Revolutionary War.

I find it completely fascinating how numbers such as "murder" can hold such close values year to year.

Don't tell Cienna there's a 19% increase in forcible rape in Seattle or we'll get several more posts about how men are rape-prone animals.

Hello, I'm Robin, welcome to TransLegal's lesson of the week. And today I'm going to talk about the differences between the terms robbery, burglary, theft and larceny. All of these are takings, but they are distinguished by the means, the methods and the victims of these takings.

http://www.translegal.com/legal-english-…

Kent
Aggravated Assault 306 -> 279

Kent is 1/5th the size of Seattle in population, so per capita, it seems like Seattle's increasing 2,183 assaults make it much more violent place in general.

@10, Schultz can shut that off with a word to his secretary any old time he wants. The person who decides whether people can bring firearms into Starbucks is him.

I expect crime numbers to increase as the prisons empty. Prison populations have been dropping for three years running now*, for the first time in forty years, due to budget cuts, which is good, but considering that virtually no ex-cons will ever be able to secure durable employment or in many cases even a place to live, I expect many of them to turn to crime (many of these former prisoners were never convicted of serious offenses, only drug charges, but will never work again).

On the other hand, long-term decreases in the total crime rate should start showing up as legalization takes hold. Some unknown but presumably non-zero amount of crime accompanies the illegal drug underworld.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/us/us-…

Funny how the front page of The Stranger has a link to an article claiming that these numbers aren't going up.

@8 That's not a theory, it's a hypothesis.

@6 Many ways? There's a right way, and a wrong way. And just putting up two numbers is the wrong way. Whatever you think the "issue" is, these numbers don't speak to it.

Also: "up slightly in 2012, by .07 percent."

*head-desk*

@6 "just proving that stats can be read many ways and are open to interpretation. Lets stop addressing the statistics and start addressing the issues."

How about we start legislating based upon science and math instead of politics?

@19 I was being as generous to the other side as possible. Of course, it's so easily disprovable that it's hardly either, really. Could we settle on, I dunno, perhaps... "canard?"

Also, you guys know what matters? Not what the DSA, or McGinn, or Murray, or I say.

What we should see, and all that matters, is a breakdown of such statistics going back as far as such statistics are kept, AND break them down per capita, over time. That's probably the only true read you can get. For example, if you had concrete reported statistics from 1900-2010, it would be trivial to compare that.

Example, all made up numbers, for armed robberies:

1970s: 1 in 10,000 people were victims
1980s: 1 in 9,000
1990s: 1 in 8,000
2000s: 1 in 7,000
2010s: 1 in 6,000

You could say -- yes, armed robberies are up and are increasingly more common. You cannot do this:

1970s: 200 armed robberies
1980s: 300
1990s: 400
2000s: 500
2010s: 600

And say, "LOOK! ARMED ROBBERIES ARE UP!", because you'd be a liar. Why? Seattle city population is up dramatically in that same time period. If you could break it down even further by neighborhood AND population over time, THAT would be the key reading. However, that would be a huge undertaking, if you even knew where to get the data.

It would be tremendously enlightening and would almost certainly upend the political apple carts of quite a few people, and I wager equal numbers of people would both desperately love to not see such a thing published as would like to see such a thing published.

@22 "up slightly in 2012, by .07 percent."

This is a statistical fart.

@24 If you can disprove it, it was still a hypothesis. Just a failed one.

Sorry to be a pest, but "theory" in anything like a scientific context is one of my pet peeves, due to the mischief creationist morons have made over the misunderstanding between the casual and scientific meanings of the word

@26 It's *that* important?

The other consideration left out of this discussion is always population increase. When professionals look at these stats they look at them as a rate, often per 100,000 persons. Because the 'n' in many of these examples is so small (20 or 23), we don't see a real change in the rate, especially if we're adding 10-20,000 residents year on year.

Rate over time is what we care about. For example statewide arrests of juveniles for violent offenses went from around 3,200 in 1994 (pop. 5,000,000) to 1,500 in 2009 (pop 7,000,000). So our rate of juvenile violent crime per population did not drop by 50%, it dropped by much more- from 64/100k to 21.4/100k.

This is all well and good, but realize that the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports are a messy, messy thing. For a crime to get counted someone has to report it to the police, the police then must properly format the crime and pass it on to the FBI, who then have to correctly register it in the UCR.

So if someone chooses not to report a crime it doesn't get counted. If the cops choose to play with the numbers there are several steps along the way where they can (it is estimated that in 1998 Philly cops failed to report 37K crimes!). Not to mention issues of how police differently report the same incidents (middle class white dude mugged? it's a violent crime!...lower class back dude assaulted? not so much).

Further, the structure of the UCR itself is deeply flawed. For example, if several crimes are committed as part of a singular occurrence (e.g., someone breaks into a house, robs shit, then rapes and kills the owners) only the worst offense (here murder) in the bunch is counted. Another issue is that if portions of data are missing (for periods of time or for entire communities) the FBI makes estimates from that city's past of from other cities that have some similarities.

So better numbers are great and all, but take it with a grain of salt....

@27 I sympathize incredibly with them. I know people who have been the victims of violent crime. What should happen is that anyone playing politics with violent crime should apologize to the victims. In particular, every anti-tax sociopath responsible for massive cut backs in mental health and substance abuse treatment funding should throw themselves prostrate on the ground before these victims and beg forgiveness.

Doing a full year by year/decade by decade/neighborhood by neighborhood per capita breakdown would probably show you exactly where you need to really apply resources. As I said, some people would welcome this; others for a variety of reasons would not.

@29 Exactly! There is way too much baking of numbers going on by advocacy groups and politicians.

"So our rate of juvenile violent crime per population did not drop by 50%, it dropped by much more- from 64/100k to 21.4/100k."

For those not doing arithmetic, that's a nearly 3x reduction.

@28 How many times can a hypothesis fail and still be a hypothesis? At some point doesn't it just become a mental condition?

Given year to year population growth in Seattle and its surrounding areas, crime rates (i.e. crimes per capita) is a more meaningful metric than raw numbers for assessing crime trends over time.

Ok, interpolating from wikipedia estimates, the population numbers for Seattle are approximately:

2011: 621,597
2012: 634,535

Murder Rates:
2011: .0032 %
2012: .0036 %

Forcible Rape Rates (general population - double them for rates per female population):
2011: .016 %
2012: .018 %

etc.

Glad I moved to Kent, when it comes to murders, Seattle will always be #1.

I have a dog, he poops, but he doesn't poop lead at high volocity at 6-year-old children to death.

Can we talk abou dogs?

@36: in raw numbers? Yeah, we'll probably have more murders than Kent. In rate per/100,000? Maybe not there.

Nationally? Seattle's homicide rate remains low.

@35 you have to look at more than two years. 2011-2012 is meaningless, especially for such a small drift in values, unless it's for some attempted political scorekeeping in an election year.

Improper rounding alert... 3 sig figs in 100 and 119.

Ok, interpolating from wikipedia estimates, the population numbers for Seattle are approximately:

2011: 621,597
2012: 634,535

Forcible Rape Rates (general population - double them for rates per female population):
2011: .0161 %
2012: .0188 %

Now that recreational weed is about to become legal in Seattle and Denver, will violent crime decline in these two cities?

@ 32 @29 Exactly! There is way too much baking of numbers going on by advocacy groups and politicians.

... and media. And that's exactly what I was trying to point out in my earlier post. This science and math has been molded, melted and shouted in service the various agendas. A basic acknowledgement that there is a problem goes a long way towards beginning to take appropriate action at the City level.

@8
Pro tip:
Washington State has a higher Concealed Carry rate than Texas.

@45 Okay.... So, what should that mean in terms of rape statistics? Should it be less than New York's?

Let's see... Seattle had 119 rapes for 626,000 population, or 19 per 100,000.

Are you including Tacoma in your carry stats? If so, Tacoma had 93 rapes for 202,000 population, or 45 per 100,000.

Both of these are worse than New York, and Tacoma is worse than Texas.

__________________
Data taken from: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cri…

Just asking: "forcible rape" as opposed to what? Statutory rape? Coercion?

If it's FBI that uses that, I'm wondering if there are rapes which are not counted. I can't even tell you if my WNY laws use the same term.

Are there different adjectives to describe rape in legal terms? On the news there might be an item about someone charged with Rape in the 3rd degree. Different adjectives for different numbers, maybe.

You have a younger population, which can contribute to crime. We have overnight housing for homeless, and it's way too cold here in the winter to just camp outdoors. You have some very poor people trying to get by in a place that's pretty expensive. I was sad to hear of the knife assault/murder by a homeless man.

OT: I was visiting last month and wished I could have stayed longer. You have a great city. And you're in spitting distance of a fabulous national park! And the Pacific Ocean! Gripe about your hometown, but to this out-of-towner it was impressive.