Crime In Wallingford: Trends

Tiare writes:

Wallingford Presbyterian Church had a break in last Monday morning. Thieves stole a safe from Stone Soup Theatre, one of our tenants. We are grateful to our neighbor across the street, who saw something suspicious and called the police. Let’s be good neighbors and keep an eye out.

We all know that crime happens in our neighborhood, and unfortunately, the church and Stone Soup have become another statistic in the Seattle PD’s database.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article comparing crime rates in Wallingford with other neighborhoods. This analysis was based upon the Micro Community Policing Plans website which was started by the city back in July, and which gives counts of crimes on a month by month basis for the 62 neighborhoods of the city. This website breaks crimes down into 8 major categories (4 categories of crimes against persons and 4 of crimes against property) and 68 subcategories which includes, for example, 8 different types of theft. The data go back to 2008, and are downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet for those wishing to perform their own analysis. For those not so inclined, tools provided by Tableau are available to plot the data in various ways right there on the MCPP website.

In this article, I’ll examine crime trends in our neighborhood over the time period of the MCPP data (2008 – 2015, the most recent, complete year).

The two line plots show the eight categories of crime tracked by the MCPP grouped into property crimes (burglary, theft, auto theft and arson) and crimes against persons (assault, rape, robbery and homicide). As I mentioned in my previous post, burglary is “the unlawful entry into a building or other structure with the intent to commit afelony or a theft” while theft is unlawfully taking something from a person. Robbery is theft “under confrontational circumstances or with “threat of force or violence.” More definitions are here.  In these two plots, I’ve shown the change in number of incidents compared to 2008 (the first year of MCPP data). This is simply to allow the four lines to fit better on a single plot since some categories have many incidents while others have few incidents, causing problems with the vertical scale.

A few things jump out at me. Among the crimes against persons, robbery is down significantly, leveling off in 2013. The actual number of incidents of robbery in 2013, 2014 and 2015 was 13 in each year. So that decline is a good thing.

Not so good are some trends I see in the property crimes category. Burglary seems to be trending up which, I guess, is consistent with what I hear from neighbors and readers posting to our crime forum. Also heading up is auto theft although last year there was a decent drop back down to 2008 levels. Before I give a “bravo” to SPD and our new police commissioner, I guess I’ll wait for the 2016 data. (The actual number of incidents of auto theft in Wallingford last year, by the way, was 102.)

I wanted to have a look at the subcategories of crimes in each of these 8 major categories for our neighborhood. At the bottom of this page is a gallery of images that you can scroll or click through. These are a little hard to study, so I apologize for that. Each image shows one major category, and there is a set of color-coded bars for each subcategory giving the number of incidents in that subcategory for each of the years 2008 through 2015. The lower bar in each 8-bar group is 2008 while the upper bar is 2015. So if the bars get longer from bottom to top, that means crime is increasing. Note that, if there were no incidents in a particular year, then no bar appears. Also note that subcategory information for homicides is not shown because there were no homicides, of any type, in Wallingford from 2008 through 2015 (according to MCPP).

Each reader can draw his or her own conclusions, but I noticed a couple of things. Aggravated assault with a weapon appears to be marching upward over the years. Also, bicycle theft is definitely on the increase. Many of the abbreviations the MCPP uses for these subcategories are puzzling, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what they mean. (That’s what the profs used to say in college, anyway. I took that to mean “I haven’t got time to figure that out!”)