Minneapolis 2008 Neighborhood Crime Analysis (Glenwood: neighborhoods, vs., statistics)

[Slig]

Camden, I'm still patiently waiting for you to post this. Any progress?

[Camden Northsider]

Originally Posted by Slig

Camden, I'm still patiently waiting for you to post this. Any progress?

Not yet - but I realized last night that they actually have #s for the entire year in excel format so that will make it a lot easier to do. So, next time I need to come up with a 2 or 3 hour distraction from everything else going on right now I'll be getting right on it! (possibly in the next few days).

[MRNorthSide]

Camden do you still get 4th precinct reports? I have only been receiving vague and uninformative crime maps recently...

[Camden Northsider]

Originally Posted by MRNorthSide

Camden do you still get 4th precinct reports? I have only been receiving vague and uninformative crime maps recently...

Come to think of it, I don't think I've gotten one in a while - I've been getting the highlights that cover all areas of Minneapolis and only feature a few of the crimes within a given precinct (as well as my neighborhood's weekly crime maps). Not sure why, it seems that even the above stuff has been getting back-logged and getting sent later than usual - might be a result of end-of-the-year reporting (very busy time for govt/ nonprofit sector).

[Camden Northsider]

Back by popular demand, attached you will find the 2008 annual edition of per capita crime rankings of all Minneapolis neighborhoods (and areas) in several categories - please note that all of the rankings go from highest to lowest (crime).

The last time I did this at the mid-year point, there was a lot of discussion as to whether larceny should be included in ranking a neighborhood's crime. Although I do believe that larceny has the ability to overskew neighborhood crime #s for petty thefts from businesses and such, I think taking it out altogether overskews a neighborhood in the positive direction, especially considering that larceny often comprises roughly half of all crime in the city. Thus you will find rankings that include "all crime" (nbrhd crime total / nbrhd population) as well as rankings that try and take the larceny problem into consideration. I figured a good compromise was the following formula (keeping in mind that I'm not a mathematician) that weights it at a .25 crime:

((larceny total/ 4) + total crimes w/o larceny) divided by neighborhood population.

So if a neighborhood had a population of 1000, its total # of crimes was 25, but 12 of the 25 were larceny, it would be the following ((12/4)+13)/ 1,000 = 0.016....this is vs. 25/1000 = .025. I figured this was a good compromise/ methodology, but if everyone is in disagreement with this I can reluctantly run the #s without larceny altogether as well.

Here they are and enjoy - there were a number of surprises for me in here....

[Camden Northsider]

All Mpls neighborhoods ranked by individual crime-

[JMadison]

So what's the story on Downtown?

[Slig]

I would exclude the downtown neighborhoods from this data because it is comparing the total crimes to the population of the area. Downtown East's population was only 128 in 2000 (all population data was taken from the 2000 census.) The population of that area is probably at least quadrupled, plus there are thousands of people going there every day to work, plus that is where the Metrodome is so you have tons of people crowding into there everytime there is a sporting event, concert, monster truck show, etc. All of this is skewing the data.

[Clifford63]

Originally Posted by Camden Northsider

Back by popular demand, attached you will find the 2008 annual edition of per capita crime rankings of all Minneapolis neighborhoods (and areas) in several categories - please note that all of the rankings go from highest to lowest (crime).

The last time I did this at the mid-year point, there was a lot of discussion as to whether larceny should be included in ranking a neighborhood's crime. Although I do believe that larceny has the ability to overskew neighborhood crime #s for petty thefts from businesses and such, I think taking it out altogether overskews a neighborhood in the positive direction, especially considering that larceny often comprises roughly half of all crime in the city. Thus you will find rankings that include "all crime" (nbrhd crime total / nbrhd population) as well as rankings that try and take the larceny problem into consideration. I figured a good compromise was the following formula (keeping in mind that I'm not a mathematician) that weights it at a .25 crime:

((larceny total/ 4) + total crimes w/o larceny) divided by neighborhood population.

So if a neighborhood had a population of 1000, its total # of crimes was 25, but 12 of the 25 were larceny, it would be the following ((12/4)+13)/ 1,000 = 0.016....this is vs. 25/1000 = .025. I figured this was a good compromise/ methodology, but if everyone is in disagreement with this I can reluctantly run the #s without larceny altogether as well.

Here they are and enjoy - there were a number of surprises for me in here....

Sounds like a fair amount of effort to gather all that info. Thanks for posting it. Seems fairly close to what I expected to see.

[Camden Northsider]

Originally Posted by Clifford63

Sounds like a fair amount of effort to gather all that info. Thanks for posting it. Seems fairly close to what I expected to see.

Thanks Clifford. And this round actually only took about 3 hours (granted, for someone with an actual life and good time management skills, that's probably a 'fair amount') - but I just had to paste the current numbers on the spreadsheets I made the first time around (then sort by categories/ make into printable PDF docs, etc.). The first time around it was a big project - consisted of going into each individual neighborhood profile's population data in the city's website, typing each one in by hand into my spreadsheet, staring at a map of the city neighborhoods for several hours in order to color-code all of the neighborhoods by their various areas, and set up formulas to calculate various data by individual neighborhoods and areas.... funny that I'm just now realizing that this is probably the most boring post I've ever done in my life, this couldn't possibly be interesting to anyone but me, and in fact it's probably pretty strange/ "off" that I consider things like this "fun"....

Slig, I do actually agree with what you're saying in regards to downtown, etc. - if someone doesn't actually look at the numbers that are making its "ranking" that high, it can be pretty misleading. And maybe calling these "rankings" is misleading - really all it is is crime per capita based on 2000 population statistics (for instance, you'll notice there's no Sumner Glenwood neighborhood as there was no population there in 2000, and I can't find anything online with any type of population statistic, and there of course aren't any 'industrial areas' either). But, I still didn't want to leave downtown out - I feel like that would be akin to saying crime doesn't happen there and/or it's not a residential neighborhood, neither of which are the case, and I'm hoping that because all of the #s are readily viewable on these lists (e.g. crime #s, population #s, etc.) that people will be able to critically think enough to make their own judgments, for better or worse.

Oh, and the biggest surprise for me was what seems to be a pretty drastic spike in burglaries in this area - the burglary spreadsheet (and neighborhood/ area rankings because of this) looks completely different than where local neighborhoods were at six months ago - I was surprised to see a Nokomis neighborhood where this was the case also.