Durham's Q2 crime stats down; Council debates crime perceptions and localized neighborhood complaints

Durham Police Department chief Jose Lopez brought a continuation of this year's good news on crime data. Except for homicides, crime levels have declined in 2009 so far relative to the last two years.

The total rate of FBI index crimes are at a three-year low, Lopez noted, with case clearance rates in both property and violent crime much higher than national averages for cities Durham's size.

Violent crime is down 11% year to date versus this time in 2008, and 3% against 2007's mid-year numbers. Meanwhile, property crime overall is down 2% against 2008 and 7% as compared to 2007.

The one down note was homicides, which are up slightly over last year.

The Council discussion divided, though, over the public perception of crime. To some on the dais, there was a question as to why Durham wasn't getting the regional recognition for lowered crime levels.

To others, though, questions lingered over complaints that have come in from some neighborhoods over crime spikes in their areas.

City Councilman Mike Woodard asked about a rash in break-ins in recent months, particularly from Northgate Park and its environs.

Among other complaints, the Council recently received an email from Colonial Village's Paula Childers, who noted what she said was a 250% increase (per the online crime mapper) in burglaries and theft within the neighborhood, with the region within a half-mile of one interception averaging one such incident per weekday in August.

"What we do is put out extra resources" like the selective enforcement team and SWAT to perform covert operations in order to identify and target those responsible for the break-ins.

Councilman Eugene Brown expressed his happiness with the general Durham numbers, but joined Woodard with his concern over what he described as some localized complaints about crime.

"In the six years I've been on Council, I must say this is probably the most messages, emails, phone calls, letters and so on I have received about primarily break-ins, property crimes."

"So on the one hand you look at our statistics city-wide, and they're good and getting better," Brown said, but fretted on increases in crime reported by residents in Colonial Village and Northgate Park and in neighborhoods like Forest Hills and Trinity Park.

"The burglaries, a lot of times it's one individual, who once he starts striking an area can do a lot of damage before either a neighbor or police officer comes up against him" or the property is found in a pawn shop, Lopez said.

"For every one burglary we are probably arresting them for, they probably did commit two to threefold because of that."

Councilman Howard Clement took a slightly different tact on the question of perception, referring to something he said he read in "the morning newspaper... my paper."

"Which paper was that?" Lopez asked -- which Clement met with a sly grin. "There's only one paper, I'm sorry. The Herald-Sun," adding "no crime intended" for the News & Observer.

Clement praised the Herald-Sun for "tell[ing] it like it is" on misperceptions in crime. "There's a whole lot of difference between what someone perceives us to be, and what the actual facts are. And this report tells us what the actual facts are."

"Is that where we need to send some of these reports to, to the east of Durham?" Clement said.

Clement also commended the DPD -- as well as residents -- for crime having "dropped precipitously" in the Operation Bulls Eye area, but noted that in the case of East Durham, he was concerned that the perceptions of local residents at least weren't where they should be.

"This report also talks about perceptions," he said, citing page four of the Operation Bulls Eye Summary, which noted "a significant difference in perception of safety while walking outside," with 82% of respondents in the area feeling safe in the day, but only 40% at night.

"We're continuing Bulls Eye. The work's not done there," Lopez said, adding that the DPD is working with the city manager's office on more partnerships with social services to bring resources into the community. "There's no way we're going to walk away from North-East Durham until we've taken care of this area," which is entering the third year of targeted enforcement.

Woodard inquired further about a spate of break-ins from suspects who were bonded out of jail, both wearing ankle monitor bracelets when arrested. "How does this monitoring work, and if these guys are wearing ankle bracelets and they're out there commiting crimes, what good do the ankle bracelets do?"

Lopez noted that was a probation office function; Woodard promised to raise it anew in the Crime Cabinet meeting this week.

Mayor Bill Bell noted that he had been one of a number of public officials who worked to get bail bonds increased for gun-based crimes, an attempt to try to keep people off the streets a bit longer.

"I still haven't gotten information as to how we're doing on that," Bell said. "I think it's really important that we really get a handle on whether this bail bond system is having the impact that we hoped it would be."

He asked for more data on whether individuals jailed for gun crimes had been kept in lock-up or had bonded out. "I've been asking for this over, and over, and over," Bell said.

Lopez did say that the decrease in crime is to some extent due to keeping more individuals in jail, but that "the reality is there are some that have already served their sentence that've come out. Many, unless we have something else for them, are going to resort back [to crime]," Lopez said.

The mayor also expressed concern over the percentage of crime being committed by youth, a factor that Lopez cited as a motivation for increased linkages with social services.

Mayor pro tem Cora Cole-McFadden expressed her concern over localized crime, and also asked about one public safety issue that's gotten some traction of late: neighborhood speeding on Mangum, an issue that drew raspberries and, just as splattering, a paintball agit-prop outrage recently.

"Speeding is something that occurs throughout the city," Lopez said. He noted that "issues of speeding have popped up" in certain communities, and claimed those communities are getting extra units in areas "where we feel [it] is needed," though he didn't get more specific than that.

As of mid-summer, the DPD faced a 4% vacancy rate for its sworn positions, with 23 out of 512 open -- a number Lopez implied had shrunk with the start of a new basic law enforcement training class.

Comments

[Toby]

'"Speeding is something that occurs throughout the city," Lopez said. He noted that "issues of speeding have popped up" in certain communities, and claimed those communities are getting extra units in areas "where we feel [it] is needed," though he didn't get more specific than that.'

I think the police department can do a little better than "feelings". The major vendors of radar speed signs all offer data collection packages, which would allow the police to track:

- Max traffic speeds
- Average traffic speeds
- Traffic time/speed intervals
- Number of vehicles above traffic speed limit
- Total number of vehicles

By deploying the speed signs in a systematic way around the city, the police can determine where the problem areas are with a high degree of accuracy. Seems like a no-brainer...

[Steve Graff]

We just got a radar speed sign installed on Trinity Ave. in Old North Durham. I've also noticed new signs getting installed on Duke and Gregson in Trinity Park. I did wonder if the signs stored the gathered speed data.

So far, some drivers do in fact slow down when they see their speed. Most, however, ignore it and continue to blast down the street.

[Michael Bacon]

Late in catching up on my blogging, but I wanted to comment on this.

Based on what I've seen in time series of crime data in Durham, I'm not surprised that crime is going down overall, complaints about burglaries are up, burglaries are up in Colonial Village, the Bull's Eye district has seen crime plummet, and residents there still don't feel safe at night.

The answer lies in this fact: during the 80's and 90's, East Durham was allowed (by a number of parties) to turn into a living hell. The residents there had little political influence, influential voters of both races were fleeing to the outlying areas, and disinvestment ran rampant as all the development and infrastructure went to places like New Hope Commons and Woodcroft. The crack epidemic and the arrival of the LA street gangs of course made everything an order of magnitude worse. This was all written off as the problem of the inner city, until the stories of toddlers getting killed by stray bullets and gunfire at funerals became too embarrassing for the city (government and polity) to ignore.

The combination of HOPE VI (a program with few fans in the urban geography circles I read in) and programs like Weed and Seed and Bull's Eye finally succeeded in reversing the trend in East Durham. Between 2002 and 2004, the area around Few Gardens saw a decline in violent crime by over half. Even after this, however, it was still the most dangerous place in the city.

The crime maps I made then showed something else, too. As crime fell out of the sky-high levels in NECD, it popped up a little bit in other parts of the city, particularly where disadvantaged populations already lived. One place that it popped up was Colonial Village, which was, connection or no, followed shortly by the emergence of a very vocal anti-crime phalanx of activists from that neighborhood.

The story of this decade and crime in Durham has been some insanely dangerous neighborhoods finally getting the attention they desperately deserved and seeing declines in crime, followed by crime creeping up in more established working class neighborhoods, followed by neighborhood outcry in these new neighborhoods, while the overall trend continues to be downward. This means that the most vocal and well-connected residents, those most likely to complain to city council, are seeing an uptick in crime. In some ways, perversely, this is a good thing. Crime is now being driven out of neighborhoods of residents who lack the wherewithall to effectively resist, and is moving into neighborhoods that have the power to fight back, meaning we get lower crime overall in the Bull City.

There's a caveat to all of this. The first and most obvious one is that it's not enough for neighborhoods like Colonial Village to be noisy -- they badly need DPD support to respond to the burglaries. The other is, where else is crime ticking upwards? Is there another Few Gardens area out there where crime is going up but the residents aren't making noise about it? The answer lies in the maps, which I unfortunately don't have the time (or currently an ArcGIS installation) to make myself.

(I should add one note -- pay no attention whatsoever to small upticks or downticks in the homicide rate in Durham. Unless it's a big change, it's noise. The multi-year trend is the only thing worth paying attention to here.)