Tuesday, June 1, 2010

our safety • our police

This just showed up on the LAT website:
LA County Sheriff's Department Might Be Booted Out of Compton

I'll update with more info as it drifts in over my transom.

As promised, here's the update from this morning's mullet-wrapper. And indeed, they've gone and done it.

4 comments:

Andrew said...

THanks. It'll be interesting to see how that pans out as a reference point for our police force. Looks like when they went LAC Sheriff they did well.

Ed said...

Andrew, I think you need to be a little more skeptical when you read the newspaper.

Yes, the homicide rate dropped in the last 10 years, but the rape rate is up about 60%, the robbery and aggravated assault rates are up more than 10%, the property crime and larceny theft rates are unchanged, and the vehicle theft rate is up 10%.

During the same time period, Pomona has shown a drop in all rates except robbery.

Also not too promising for the LA County Sheriff is that Compton is 10 square miles with less than 100,000 people, but Pomona is 23 square miles and about 165,000 people. With all the additional force that the Sheriff can purportedly bring, I'd expect them to be more successful with smaller cities.

FYI I pulled this from the 1985-2008 data available at the Bureau of Justice Statistics website. 2009 data isn't currently available for Compton.

Skrip said...

Another reason the crime rate was down somewhat is due to the recent Latino immigrant population growth spurt in Compton for the last decade. Compton was known as a mostly African-American community. It was hit hard when Gangsta Rap sprouted in the region. The crip/blood craze during the mid-80s through the 90s brought a heavy increase in crime.

My point is that it can be somewhat coincidental that the crime rate when down during the Sheriff's tenure there.

Andrew said...

maybe we should hybridize city police with county police to get ALL crime levels reduced. ha!