LawDog
02-07-2022, 05:22 PM
Another thread sparked this, but I’m bringing it here to address it separately. We all know how statistics can be twisted, manipulated, or outright fabricated. But I want to discuss it with a particular goal in mind: how to use this knowledge to increase your own family’s safety.
When I was a student at The University of Georgia, there was a serial rapist preying on the girls there. He was eventually captured, but I remember girls that I knew who were (rightfully) worried. Some friends and I even organized a free self-defense seminar for the girls. A year or so later, I randomly picked up a brochure at the registrar’s office that was an advertisement to parents, extolling the virtues of life at UGA. Among the reasons given, one was the very low incidence of crime. It even included data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports covering the last several years. The number of sexual assaults listed was….zero.
I could recount a half-dozen separate incidents, and that was just from what I had seen in the papers. But close examination revealed that every one of them occurred just off of the University property. Each one was at an apartment or parking lot that everyone would have identified as being part of campus. But the actual spot of ground itself was not officially University property. And the school cops (the guys we teasingly called “2.5s”) weren’t going to fight for jurisdiction. So those rapes went into the statistics for the county, but not for the school. That was my first life lesson on crime statistics.
After college, I managed to escape from Georgia. I was still a poor kid, though. I made it to Richmond, Virginia, and was living in what seemed like style to me. Long before the communists had pulled down those glorious statues, I had a place just off Monument Avenue. It was a lower income bracket, but not high crime. Whether it was accomplished through iron fist enforcement, or just happenstance social evolution, I could not determine. But I quickly learned the geography of crime in my new home. I was in the buffer zone. One block north of me were million-dollar homes from the 19th century. Two blocks south of me was the hood. Whether it was fear or lack of an industrious spirit, those hood rats stayed well away from my home. They would tear it up in their own area, and you would be a fool to walk through there at night. But they stayed in their place.
Any realtor in the area knew exactly where you could live in peace and where you couldn’t. The lines didn’t match the zip codes or the school districts, but they were firmly defined. If you did a statistical analysis, the area in which I lived would appear to be atrocious, because the statistics looked at a much broader area. The rate of violent crime was off the charts. But the reality was quite different.
My memory is certainly shaded by my own history. At that time, I was still living in the mindset of southside Atlanta. Coming from there, everything seemed more peaceful. Today, I might view it differently.
Alaska provided several lessons on statistics. The most significant lesson by far is the hazard of small sample size. Small populations consistently lead to outrageous results. And Alaska is nothing if not a small sample size.
On paper, Alaska has an ‘epidemic’ of drunk driving. And no one ever really questions that. It just goes along with the state’s image. People accept Homer Simpson’s wisdom: In Alaska, you can never be too fat or too drunk. Having directly worked on these cases in three different states, and getting feedback from trusted sources in other states, I am confident in asserting that drunk driving isn’t more likely or a bigger problem in Alaska than it is in many other areas. One reason that it looks like more of a problem is because they have more enforcement. Alaska is short on roads, so drunks don’t have many backroad options. This makes searching for drunks and stolen cars in Alaska easier than in other places. The statistics themselves will bear out that Alaska has very few auto thefts. The ease of observation, which greases the skids for enforcement, means that more drunks get caught. Additionally, Alaskan police departments have learned to make use of their ‘epidemic’ and used it to obtain grants and other federal funding. So they have a vested interest in catching more drunk drivers because it is tied directly to their bottom line.
Sex assault is another crime that is astronomically high in Alaska. But if you dive into the cases, you’ll immediately note a trend: most of the cases are in the villages, and the offender and victim are family. Are those cases terrible? Absolutely. But they aren’t a threat to my wife, which is all I’m worried about. If you limited your study to sexual assaults between strangers, you’d find that over half of them occur at one or two bars in Anchorage, the victim was drunk/high, and it was after 2 a.m. (Don’t EVER go to the Gaslight Lounge on 4th Avenue. Ever.) In over a decade of criminal work, I saw one true drag-her-into-the-bushes rapist in Alaska. One.
The incidence of sexual assault is the kind of thing that will make a woman choose not to live someplace. You can go to city-data.org or a similar website and pull a number right up onto your screen. But the reality is that the number on the screen is a very poor measure of the danger that a reasonable woman would face.
Another problem with statistics is the fact that we tend to assume the definitions, and they don’t always match up. Example: an 18-year-old who is a sort of teacher’s assistant at an after-school dance academy takes the opportunity when demonstrating a dance move to grope a 16-year-old through her leotard. It’s wrong, and he shouldn’t have done it. But it’s not what anyone would call “rape.” If you were the girl’s father, you might punch the kid in the nose, but you wouldn’t string him up from a tree. But under Alaska law, it’s Sexual Abuse of a Minor in the 4th Degree. It should be automatically baffling to anyone that we would have a crime of “sexual abuse” and that it is a misdemeanor. Those two things don’t seem to match up. But the petty little misdemeanors, simply because of their title, get lumped in with all of the other sexual assaults. There is a world of difference between copping a feel on a girl’s butt in dance class and beating and raping a woman behind a dumpster. But on paper, they go into the same category.
The inability to distinguish between such diverse acts makes these statistics useless. With some crimes, the numbers are a reasonable reflection of reality. There isn’t that much variation in auto theft, but assaults cover a broad spectrum.
What if the statistic for homicides includes every event in which any person intentionally killed another person? Meaning, what if the homicide rate includes self-defense cases, or times when police shot a bad guy? If half of the homicides are justifiable, then the statistic looks twice as bad as it looks in reality (at least from my point of view).
Learning to fight, equipping yourself with weapons, and hardening your home’s defenses are all good measures to take. But the single greatest thing you can do to increase your family’s safety is a change in zip code. That’s a hard lesson for many to accept, because it boils down to this: If you want to protect your family, then make more money. But as jagged as that pill may be, it’s truth.
Money alone won’t do it, though. It’s only a part of the equation. I know areas in Atlanta where people live in million-dollar homes and they can’t walk to their mailbox without the risk of getting robbed. And there are places way out in the sticks where you can live in a double-wide and be quite safe.
It will always be a balance, and it will hinge on factors that are specific to your life, your skills, your job prospects. But in the economy of today, people are increasingly able to live where they want. You no longer have to live in Silicon Valley to work for Google, as long as you have a good internet connection.
If you can choose where to live, and safety is a priority, it still makes sense to start with the crime statistics. But take them with a BIG grain of salt. There are other lessons I have learned. Some general principles for finding a peaceful area:
1) Avoid being too near the Mexican border. This advice is usually stated in a more vague way, with references to “an international border” or something along those lines. It gets muddied and isn’t taught clearly because everybody is afraid of being called a racist. The reality of life, though, is that there isn’t much crime on the Canadian border.
2) Avoid diversity. I’m really not trying to dress myself up in white sheets here, and I hope I’ve established my reputation solidly enough that people won’t think I’m some crazed bigot. But diversity and crime go together like cheese and crackers. Homogenous societies exhibit far lower rates of crime—both violent and nonviolent crime, but particularly lower rates of violent crime. Any area that promotes itself as “diverse” is advertising a negative, and that’s only going to attract more of something undesirable.
3) Steeples equal safety. Jesus Christ is love. When you zoom out and look at the world with a macro view, it is ironic that the Bible Belt actually has a very high violent crime rate. But when you zoom in and look at the micro level, you’ll see that the churches are usually set apart from the liquor stores, pawn shops, and check-cashing stops. Live near the churches.
4) You can buy safety. Your realtor will tell you that you are buying the neighborhood, not the house. And it’s true. Spending more than what seems necessary is sometimes an effective way of keeping out the riff-raff.
5) Rules can be good. On one hand, I hate living under an HOA and I’d like to just be free of them. On the other hand, I like that the idiot down the street is constrained by some rules that force him to live in a more organized fashion than he otherwise might. Gated communities are even better.
6) Don’t live near areas where liberals have political power. They will ruin everything. You don’t just not want to live among them; you don’t even want to be near them. Their sickness spreads.
7) Farms and ranches are good. If you can live somewhere where farming and ranching are still viable businesses, and live among them, do so. Tech hubs will come and go, but people aren’t going to stop eating. These areas tend to be slightly poor, but they are stable.
8) Southern hospitality (i.e. nosiness) is a good thing. I grew up southern, but have always liked the way northerners will just leave you alone. Southerners will be all up in your business. But that nosy nature is good for ferreting out the evil-doers.
9) Live with the old people. Retirees are always home and always watching. If you can identify an area or neighborhood that is older, that’s a good find. This is a statistic that is easily tracked.
As you look through that list, you’ll see some that are easily tracked with statistical measurement and some that are not. You can look at an area to see the median age, educational level, income level, or home price. You can’t easily track how “southern” an area is.
Use the statistics to help guide you, but don’t trust the statistics. They are just a starting point for deeper analysis.
When I was a student at The University of Georgia, there was a serial rapist preying on the girls there. He was eventually captured, but I remember girls that I knew who were (rightfully) worried. Some friends and I even organized a free self-defense seminar for the girls. A year or so later, I randomly picked up a brochure at the registrar’s office that was an advertisement to parents, extolling the virtues of life at UGA. Among the reasons given, one was the very low incidence of crime. It even included data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports covering the last several years. The number of sexual assaults listed was….zero.
I could recount a half-dozen separate incidents, and that was just from what I had seen in the papers. But close examination revealed that every one of them occurred just off of the University property. Each one was at an apartment or parking lot that everyone would have identified as being part of campus. But the actual spot of ground itself was not officially University property. And the school cops (the guys we teasingly called “2.5s”) weren’t going to fight for jurisdiction. So those rapes went into the statistics for the county, but not for the school. That was my first life lesson on crime statistics.
After college, I managed to escape from Georgia. I was still a poor kid, though. I made it to Richmond, Virginia, and was living in what seemed like style to me. Long before the communists had pulled down those glorious statues, I had a place just off Monument Avenue. It was a lower income bracket, but not high crime. Whether it was accomplished through iron fist enforcement, or just happenstance social evolution, I could not determine. But I quickly learned the geography of crime in my new home. I was in the buffer zone. One block north of me were million-dollar homes from the 19th century. Two blocks south of me was the hood. Whether it was fear or lack of an industrious spirit, those hood rats stayed well away from my home. They would tear it up in their own area, and you would be a fool to walk through there at night. But they stayed in their place.
Any realtor in the area knew exactly where you could live in peace and where you couldn’t. The lines didn’t match the zip codes or the school districts, but they were firmly defined. If you did a statistical analysis, the area in which I lived would appear to be atrocious, because the statistics looked at a much broader area. The rate of violent crime was off the charts. But the reality was quite different.
My memory is certainly shaded by my own history. At that time, I was still living in the mindset of southside Atlanta. Coming from there, everything seemed more peaceful. Today, I might view it differently.
Alaska provided several lessons on statistics. The most significant lesson by far is the hazard of small sample size. Small populations consistently lead to outrageous results. And Alaska is nothing if not a small sample size.
On paper, Alaska has an ‘epidemic’ of drunk driving. And no one ever really questions that. It just goes along with the state’s image. People accept Homer Simpson’s wisdom: In Alaska, you can never be too fat or too drunk. Having directly worked on these cases in three different states, and getting feedback from trusted sources in other states, I am confident in asserting that drunk driving isn’t more likely or a bigger problem in Alaska than it is in many other areas. One reason that it looks like more of a problem is because they have more enforcement. Alaska is short on roads, so drunks don’t have many backroad options. This makes searching for drunks and stolen cars in Alaska easier than in other places. The statistics themselves will bear out that Alaska has very few auto thefts. The ease of observation, which greases the skids for enforcement, means that more drunks get caught. Additionally, Alaskan police departments have learned to make use of their ‘epidemic’ and used it to obtain grants and other federal funding. So they have a vested interest in catching more drunk drivers because it is tied directly to their bottom line.
Sex assault is another crime that is astronomically high in Alaska. But if you dive into the cases, you’ll immediately note a trend: most of the cases are in the villages, and the offender and victim are family. Are those cases terrible? Absolutely. But they aren’t a threat to my wife, which is all I’m worried about. If you limited your study to sexual assaults between strangers, you’d find that over half of them occur at one or two bars in Anchorage, the victim was drunk/high, and it was after 2 a.m. (Don’t EVER go to the Gaslight Lounge on 4th Avenue. Ever.) In over a decade of criminal work, I saw one true drag-her-into-the-bushes rapist in Alaska. One.
The incidence of sexual assault is the kind of thing that will make a woman choose not to live someplace. You can go to city-data.org or a similar website and pull a number right up onto your screen. But the reality is that the number on the screen is a very poor measure of the danger that a reasonable woman would face.
Another problem with statistics is the fact that we tend to assume the definitions, and they don’t always match up. Example: an 18-year-old who is a sort of teacher’s assistant at an after-school dance academy takes the opportunity when demonstrating a dance move to grope a 16-year-old through her leotard. It’s wrong, and he shouldn’t have done it. But it’s not what anyone would call “rape.” If you were the girl’s father, you might punch the kid in the nose, but you wouldn’t string him up from a tree. But under Alaska law, it’s Sexual Abuse of a Minor in the 4th Degree. It should be automatically baffling to anyone that we would have a crime of “sexual abuse” and that it is a misdemeanor. Those two things don’t seem to match up. But the petty little misdemeanors, simply because of their title, get lumped in with all of the other sexual assaults. There is a world of difference between copping a feel on a girl’s butt in dance class and beating and raping a woman behind a dumpster. But on paper, they go into the same category.
The inability to distinguish between such diverse acts makes these statistics useless. With some crimes, the numbers are a reasonable reflection of reality. There isn’t that much variation in auto theft, but assaults cover a broad spectrum.
What if the statistic for homicides includes every event in which any person intentionally killed another person? Meaning, what if the homicide rate includes self-defense cases, or times when police shot a bad guy? If half of the homicides are justifiable, then the statistic looks twice as bad as it looks in reality (at least from my point of view).
Learning to fight, equipping yourself with weapons, and hardening your home’s defenses are all good measures to take. But the single greatest thing you can do to increase your family’s safety is a change in zip code. That’s a hard lesson for many to accept, because it boils down to this: If you want to protect your family, then make more money. But as jagged as that pill may be, it’s truth.
Money alone won’t do it, though. It’s only a part of the equation. I know areas in Atlanta where people live in million-dollar homes and they can’t walk to their mailbox without the risk of getting robbed. And there are places way out in the sticks where you can live in a double-wide and be quite safe.
It will always be a balance, and it will hinge on factors that are specific to your life, your skills, your job prospects. But in the economy of today, people are increasingly able to live where they want. You no longer have to live in Silicon Valley to work for Google, as long as you have a good internet connection.
If you can choose where to live, and safety is a priority, it still makes sense to start with the crime statistics. But take them with a BIG grain of salt. There are other lessons I have learned. Some general principles for finding a peaceful area:
1) Avoid being too near the Mexican border. This advice is usually stated in a more vague way, with references to “an international border” or something along those lines. It gets muddied and isn’t taught clearly because everybody is afraid of being called a racist. The reality of life, though, is that there isn’t much crime on the Canadian border.
2) Avoid diversity. I’m really not trying to dress myself up in white sheets here, and I hope I’ve established my reputation solidly enough that people won’t think I’m some crazed bigot. But diversity and crime go together like cheese and crackers. Homogenous societies exhibit far lower rates of crime—both violent and nonviolent crime, but particularly lower rates of violent crime. Any area that promotes itself as “diverse” is advertising a negative, and that’s only going to attract more of something undesirable.
3) Steeples equal safety. Jesus Christ is love. When you zoom out and look at the world with a macro view, it is ironic that the Bible Belt actually has a very high violent crime rate. But when you zoom in and look at the micro level, you’ll see that the churches are usually set apart from the liquor stores, pawn shops, and check-cashing stops. Live near the churches.
4) You can buy safety. Your realtor will tell you that you are buying the neighborhood, not the house. And it’s true. Spending more than what seems necessary is sometimes an effective way of keeping out the riff-raff.
5) Rules can be good. On one hand, I hate living under an HOA and I’d like to just be free of them. On the other hand, I like that the idiot down the street is constrained by some rules that force him to live in a more organized fashion than he otherwise might. Gated communities are even better.
6) Don’t live near areas where liberals have political power. They will ruin everything. You don’t just not want to live among them; you don’t even want to be near them. Their sickness spreads.
7) Farms and ranches are good. If you can live somewhere where farming and ranching are still viable businesses, and live among them, do so. Tech hubs will come and go, but people aren’t going to stop eating. These areas tend to be slightly poor, but they are stable.
8) Southern hospitality (i.e. nosiness) is a good thing. I grew up southern, but have always liked the way northerners will just leave you alone. Southerners will be all up in your business. But that nosy nature is good for ferreting out the evil-doers.
9) Live with the old people. Retirees are always home and always watching. If you can identify an area or neighborhood that is older, that’s a good find. This is a statistic that is easily tracked.
As you look through that list, you’ll see some that are easily tracked with statistical measurement and some that are not. You can look at an area to see the median age, educational level, income level, or home price. You can’t easily track how “southern” an area is.
Use the statistics to help guide you, but don’t trust the statistics. They are just a starting point for deeper analysis.