09-27-2016, 06:00 PM
More poor reporting:
Police calls up in Kitchener core
This kind of lazy reporting really bothers me. The headline essentially screams “DANGER! Do not enter scary downtown Kitchener.”
First, the headline itself is bit of a leap to say that crime is up “in Kitchener core” when the central division covers the area from the Wellington-Waterloo border to the Wilmot-Kitchener border and south of Victoria/7&8 to Kossouth/401/New Dundee; the actual Kitchener core (Victoria park) policing zone is much smaller. For all we know crime could have been up in all the areas outside of the actual Kitchener core instead. Unfortunately a breakdown by policing zone/area is not available as it has been in previous reports. For example, in Q1 of 2016 you can see that that four of the eight zones in the central division had increases higher than the Kitchener Core and Victoria Park area including, Eastwood/Frederick, Rockway/Fairview Park Mall, Laurentian/Country Hills, and Mill/Highland/SMH.
Secondly, those raw counts do not account for population growth, which would limit the increase to <2%:
2015 51,567 575,000 89.7 per 1,000
2016 53,578 586,300 91.4 per 1,000
((91.4 - 89.7) / 89.7) x 100 = +1.89%
Finally, if you look at the list of ten most frequent types of calls responded to a large majority of the types are more along the lines of social services, medical, and by-law call types, and not “crime” or even “violent crime” as the newspaper would like lead you to believe.
Police calls up in Kitchener core
This kind of lazy reporting really bothers me. The headline essentially screams “DANGER! Do not enter scary downtown Kitchener.”
First, the headline itself is bit of a leap to say that crime is up “in Kitchener core” when the central division covers the area from the Wellington-Waterloo border to the Wilmot-Kitchener border and south of Victoria/7&8 to Kossouth/401/New Dundee; the actual Kitchener core (Victoria park) policing zone is much smaller. For all we know crime could have been up in all the areas outside of the actual Kitchener core instead. Unfortunately a breakdown by policing zone/area is not available as it has been in previous reports. For example, in Q1 of 2016 you can see that that four of the eight zones in the central division had increases higher than the Kitchener Core and Victoria Park area including, Eastwood/Frederick, Rockway/Fairview Park Mall, Laurentian/Country Hills, and Mill/Highland/SMH.
Secondly, those raw counts do not account for population growth, which would limit the increase to <2%:
2015 51,567 575,000 89.7 per 1,000
2016 53,578 586,300 91.4 per 1,000
((91.4 - 89.7) / 89.7) x 100 = +1.89%
Finally, if you look at the list of ten most frequent types of calls responded to a large majority of the types are more along the lines of social services, medical, and by-law call types, and not “crime” or even “violent crime” as the newspaper would like lead you to believe.
Everyone move to the back of the bus and we all get home faster.