QCI had a post on his blog titled "Crime stuff, Phoenix, Guardian Angels, etc." and I would like to reply to one of his commenters. You can go to his blog you can go
here.
To anonymous at 3:57 PM-
You state that my figures are unreliable when the said figures come from the FBI. I didn't use figures for both sides of the river because I live in Davenport and want people here to know there is a problem. QCI mentioned the crime rate in Phoenix so I provided figures, and explained how I came to that conclusion. Since there aren't any other cities closer to our population I used Des Moines and Cedar Rapids because they were the closer in population. And if you divide 360,000 by 3.6 you sill get the rates per 100,000. So come up with different numbers, or prove me wrong; otherwise your arguement is all wet. I am glad you think this is a safe place to live but we do need to keep doing better.
And now on a different note I just found out from this month's Rod & Custom that an Icon from my drag racing past has died. John "Big John" Mazmanian passed away on July 21 at the age of 80. If you were of fan of the 60's Gasser Wars you remember Big John and his 41' Willys coupe, or maybe his Austin gasser. Gone but not forgotten.
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4 comments:
Yeah... I really wasn't trying to start a war of blogs or anything.
The anonymous poster was on sort of the right track in mentioning the QC as a whole feeding our crime problem, but his solution of dividing our crime by the entire metro isn't valid. I'm sure Rock Island's crime rate isn't very pretty either, so adding that into ours probably keeps us ranked poorly.
Obviously being the victim of a crime changes peoples' perspectives, and your chances of that happening are higher SoLo than MOST other areas of Davenport. That said, I feel safe walking down nearly all streets and neighborhoods in SoLo, so we do have to avoid painting the entire half of Davenport as crime-ridden.
I also feel safe in the SoLo area, but the point I was trying to make was that we have a bad reputation, deserved or not. And the people who have this opinion of our area are steadfast in the belief that crime is rampant here. I don't know how to change that, but I sure would like to.
There's no war or even squabble, the more blogs that discuss our area the better. MY point about adding Rock Island statistics to what I already did is this; where would it end?
3:57 - I stand by my statement and methodology. You don't add the crimes AND population in Rock Island and Moline. You add just the populations and also add in Bettendorf, Riverdale, Blue Grass, Eldridge, East Moline and Milan. When 20-30% of the criminals in the Scott County jail are from Rock Island it is clear you need to include their population in the denominator. You don't include the crimes committed in Rock Island County because the focus of measure is Scott County crime rates.
I do agree with Cruiser's point that there is a bad reputation. We do need to find ways to address it. But I think using (in my opinion) misleading, bulked up crime stats is not productive to the discussion.
My point was, and is, regardless of where they came from the crime was committed here. And if I just added the populations of the other cities, and not their crime rate, it would give an artificially low crime number. Every city listed on the FBI site, or any other doesn't take into account where the criminal came from, only where he committed the crime. I cannot see what is misleading about stating how many crimes happened here. Not Rock Island, not Bettendorf, but here. If you know of a site that breaks it down any better than the FBI site, send me the url and I'll check it out.
I think the bad reputation goes way back, at least the eastern part of SoLo. Years ago when the Shamrock Tap was at 8th and LeClaire, everyone inside was killed in a robbery. And just as many years ago there used to a bar on the corner of Farnum and Federal that got it's front windows shot out, during business hours, on a regular basis.
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